We're not really a startup, but we're still a small (9 employees + 1 part time sales), growing company and we finally need some CRM software.
Our Owner has been using and loving MS's Business Contact Manager. It integrates VERY well with Outlook but doesn't seem to be available for multiple users without a little server hacking.
We just brought in someone to do sales part time, and I started a few months back as a Product Manager who also happens to do a lot of customer support. The Sales Guy has used SalesForce. I've used/administered Sugar, Oracle/Siebel, and, to a lesser degree, SalesForce in the past. I'm opposed to these three as I think they are far far too complicated for our needs and I don't much care to administer those systems again.
Obviously, the 3 of us all have quite differing needs (below) and I'm having a hard time finding a solution that will make all of us happy.
- Owner:
- Integration with an email system
- Robustness and speed of desktop apps (drag and drop and such)
- Track/Manage support contracts
- Sales Guy:
- Simplicity
- Ability to track leads and opportunities
- Product Manager:
- Integration with an email system
- Simplicity
- Consolidated view of past interactions with customers
- Easy way to add new customers (take action directly from a selected email)
I've trialed:
- MS Dynamics - Their Outlook integration is very slow and leads much to be desired. I would expect to be able to right click an email and add that sender as a contact and easily add to the system. Instead, I can "track" a single email thread which also adds an ID number to the email subject.
- Zoho - Also lacking in the email integration department.
- Highrise - I like the simplicity of this so far, but we do have to forward emails to a new account to add to the system. Some better integration would be nice.
- Act - Well, I was in progress of testing this, but I'm not installing SQL Server right now...
It seems like there are quite a few systems that integrate with Gmail but we'd have to switch to Google Apps. I've got Capsule, Solve360, Insightly on my list to test if that route seems worthwhile.
It seems unlikely given how many different things we need it to do, but is there a desktop app that does what we need? If not, what's the best cloud-based implementation that will work for us?
