

Ask HN: Which CRM are you using? - vrikhter

We're growing our customer base and are increasing the amount of incoming leads that we can't deal with it by ourselves without the help of some technology.
So we're hoping you can provide us with some info:<p>1) Which CRM are you using? 
2) Why did you choose it? 
3) Any problems you are having with it?<p>We are a SaaS company that sells one product in a 3-tiered pricing strategy. We don't have a sales team at the moment, but will be building one out. Thanks!
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philiphodgen
1\. Daylite. www.marketcircle.com.

2(a). Because all my data are belong to me. (sic) (AKA I don't want to be held
hostage to monthly fees in order to keep my business going. That's why I
abandoned 37 Signals.)

2(b). Because we are all-Mac and Daylite is kind of all there is on the Mac.

2(c). It has an iPhone app - this is the killer feature of Daylite for me. It
is actually better than the desktop software. This is a $50/year item, not a
one-time purchase, which is the primary reason I am always looking for an
alternative. Do you hear that, www.marketcircle.com? Abuse your customers with
pricing and they'll constantly be looking for the door. Which I am.

2(d). Because in fact Daylite works quite well for a team of 5 to be up to
date on all of the projects and opportunities going on in the office.

3(a). Daylite's ability to sync remotely with my MacBook has been shit,
frankly. The so-called "offline" capability isn't capable.

3(b). Daylite's ability to sync between its own contact database and Address
Book, and between its own calendar and iCal has been shit, frankly.
Marketcircle blames this on Apple's sync services. 3,500 contacts? C'mon. It's
not that much.

What I'm looking for - I watch for stuff that will plug into Google Apps and
will have an app for an Android phone. I'd be gone in a second, as soon as I'm
comfortable that I have control over my own data utterly and completely.

Tried Salesforce, Zoho. UI is crap, complex, overdone for our purposes.

Breathing and blood. Hard for humans to outsource comfortably. Same with
business - finance and CRM. While I and happy/eager to go to the cloud, I
won't do so until the data exit is simple and trivial.

/Phil

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paulsingh
For the past 2-3 years, I've been using Salesforce almost exclusively... once
I feel like I need a CRM, that is.

Prior to that stage, I stick to email and Google Docs. Highrise doesn't really
work for me and I guess I just like my personal process better.

SFDC may be expensive, but:

1\. Every (good) sales person you hire was probably using it at their last
job. 2\. It's one less thing you need to manage -- trust me, you don't want to
risk losing your customer/lead data. 3\. Why innovate on the sales process?
SFDC may be clunky, but the lead -> opportunity -> account process is pretty
straightforward.

Feel free to ping me directly if you want to discuss further. I've walked a
bunch of companies through this process over the past few years, happy to help
if I can.

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fjabre
I've used Highrise and Salesforce.. SF was too expensive and pandered to
fortune 500 companies with large budgets and long lists of feature requests.
Highrise was a huge improvement but still fell short in terms of email
integration and some other key features.

We're working on a fully email integrated simple CRM. If you want to be a part
of our free private beta (to be released late next month) please let me know.
My email is in my profile.

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CyberFonic
If you want to outsource your CRM or are not sure, take a look at
<http://www.sugarcrm.com> or if you might want to be control of your destiny
and include ERP then take a look at <http://www.openerp.com> which includes
CRM amongst many other modules.

