
Which CRM is better for business? - candys
I run a small business and I would love some advice about the best CRM or other customer tracker type apps that work for you. Thanks!
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kull
Spreadsheet is always a good start. Simple , free and works on a small scale.
As you overgrow it, you will know why it is not working anymore and that will
help you to find a tool that does what your spreadsheet stopped being able to
do.

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selmat
seconded....spreadsheets are almost everywhere. Even small tweaks can be
scripted.

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matt_the_bass
I agree. We’ve recently migrated to sales force. We like it. But we started
with a mishmash of bugzilla, Trello, and google sheets for managing sales
leads, production planning and service issues. As our needs grew it made sense
to move to something like SF. But we totally did not need that on day 1.

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andygcook
HubSpot is actually pretty good. For starters, it's free. They have most of
the tools you'd want to run an efficient sales process available as add-ons
too. It's also gaining steam and likely to end up with the most third party
integrations behind Salesforce. They also have a HubSpot for Startups program
which can get you 90% off your first year.

Full disclosure: I used to work at HubSpot on the product team, but I didn't
work on the CRM. In fact, I kind of built a competitive product to the HubSpot
CRM internally for awhile, so wouldn't say it was good unless it really was.

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jillesvangurp
+1 on hubspot. They also have nice APIs and their freemium package is very
nice. API usage is part of the freemium package. We use it to send leads from
our backend system.

I think their premise is that CRMs are a commodity and all the value is in
upselling the type of features that they charge for. So making sure the
baseline CRM is very good drives sales for that. Either way, it's a decent
product.

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wlj
I have to disagree on Hubspot CRM. We moved to it on the startup plan you
mention about 7-8 months ago, and have found it very difficult to use in a
fast, intuitive and streamlined fashion.

There are key areas that are missing basic functionality (EG: being able to
see a list of deals that haven't been contacted recently) and if I could turn
back time, I would not have made the decision to move to Hubspot.

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coffeeandjunk
I'd suggest you to start with Google Sheets. Most of the needs would get
fulfilled there. By the time it becomes a hassle you'll know exactly what
extra benefits/features you need and which app solves them.

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cvolzer3
Big fan of Pipedrive myself. Fairly lightweight, but with good features.
Visual pipeline structure is nice. Easy to use interface (though text
formatting is a weak spot).

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smithmayowa
Shameful self promotion, but I am currently working on a user feedback
collection crm at www.testimonly.com check it out to see if you might be
interested.

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Rjevski
Intercom is quite good and also works as a customer support platform.

