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I'm looking for a low-cost or hopefully free for 1-3 users CRM software that has the following features:

1) Integrates with my email automatically (I'd like for all the email conversations, with a contact in my list, to be associated in my CRM)
2) Has social-media "hookin" where it can show me feeds from twitter/linkedin/facebook/blogs for contacts in my CRM
3) Has a tag capability where I can tag contacts in various ways
4) Integrates or syncs with my address book
5) Is simple to use. Small business oriented. Not looking for overwhelming UI or a gazillion of little textboxes to fill out.

Overall, I'm looking to switch to either Google Apps or Office365 or similar and want a CRM to go along.. thus hopefully the CRM is an online tool and integrates with Google Apps or Office365?

Is this too much to ask?

Thanks!

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7 Answers

up vote 2 down vote

I recently had to research this topic for one of our startups. After a few weeks I cam up with this:

Assistly.com Service that you subscribe to has full email piping rules, allows you to publish help topics, also well intergrated with some social media specially Twitter.

Cerb5 http://www.cerberusweb.com/ This is the choice we went with. Its more of a helpdesk and ticket system like assistly, but has a lot of robust CRM fields and can be used for Sales@yourcompany.com. The great thing about Cerb5 is that you can install it on your own sever, and modify it to fit your needs. We modified the help documentation and are working on integrating it with Question2Answer.org's question and answer forum.

The best part about cerb5 is the team over there is kick ass. As a startup they will give you a FREE licence for 3 concurrent logins. Meaning you can have a staff of 10 but only 4 logged in at once.

We are very pleased.

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up vote 1 down vote

Being the creator of both ACT! and SalesLogix I would recommend neither!

I like Highrise which works great with MailChimp, There are a lot of things I would do with Highrise to make it more to my liking but the combo is hard to beat in terms of functionality and price.

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I liked highrise too, but it only integrates with twitter and requires bcc'ing email addresses in order to associate emails with contacts in it :( thanks! – Igorek Nov 28 '10 at 16:13
up vote 0 down vote accepted

Appreciate everyone's answers. It looks like the best social CRM that I could find that links with my email and social media is... Gist... at gist.com -- and it's free (no clue how they make money)... It's not a full sales-cycle management, but more of a contact management tool that has the ability to assign notes to each contact... currently, it's all I need.

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up vote 0 down vote

I am a fan of HEAP. Very functional and cheap at $9 a month. If you won't pay that then...

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up vote 0 down vote

Check out zoho. It is free.

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up vote 0 down vote

Go with Bantam Live + Rapportive, they do all of those and perfectly and really really cheap.

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up vote -1 down vote

Would you be willing to pay for the software that fits your needs? why wouldn't you, right? I am working on a solution very similar to what you just described, if you are interested you can sign for the beta when it is ready:

http://tidycontact.com

There are also some solutions out there (with free versions) that offer some of your requirements such as Zoho CRM, SugarCRM, Highrise, etc...

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Zoho CRM is pretty sad, and Sugar is noth that great unless if you pay up for a real licsence. I think you just end up building it yourself. The problem with CRM is that it tries to be everything ot everyone. Each buisness has its own pipelines and rules. The cleanest approach is just to hack out your own CRM DB in a few weeks worth of work, and build on it. We built on cerb5 and are very pleased. – Frank Nov 22 '10 at 7:37

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