

Ask YC: What CRM do you use? - jyu

I'm looking for a non-sucky, cheap CRM software/web app to manage several hundred contacts.  Any suggestions?
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gscott
OfficeZilla.com. It rocks... but I am biased!

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carpal
Salesforce.com at the moment. It is pretty awful and kind of expensive, so
we're developing our own.

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dshah
Is it really worth it to develop your own CRM (no matter how awful
Salesforce.com might be)?

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carpal
For us, yes. We spend about as much per month on Salesforce as a developer's
salary. Might as well devote 2 or 3 months of developer time and come up with
something that actually fits our needs.

(sorry for the late response)

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dejb
SugarCRM. The bastards removed half of the Project Management functionality in
5.0 but now they are promising to bring it back.

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igexome
Genius.com -> SalesGenius product. Can use as a straight web app or even
integrate with Outlook. Also - cheap!

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izak30
I just tried Heap, it's pretty good, also I installed sugar on my testing
machine, not as good as heap, IMO.

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huherto
We use salesforce.com for one person. That way we don't have to pay anything
and it is all that we need.

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vdm
Please, link these things up people.

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jgrahamc
At Electric Cloud we use SalesForce.com. It works.

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nextmoveone
SugarCRM is cheap, but I am not too fond of it...

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dshah
We use Salesforce.com at my startup HubSpot.

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sumrandommember
Salesforce.com

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joshwa
Highrise?

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christefano
CiviCRM.

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fuct
SugarCRM

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Flemlord
Outlook

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gibsonf1
streamfocus.com

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nickhac
We evaluated SugarCRM and i have heard at least 20+ reccomendtations to use
it.

In the end we went with salesforce.com and our guys love it... The outlook
integration has made it easy to bake into everyday processes (along with xobni
for search etc).

That said ideally we would like to see something more holistic from CRM.

It seems most "CRM" products are really just great at sales pipeline
management, and dont really cover the end to end business efficiency features
we really need...

Eg Cross Channel Marketing Conversion linked into the sales pipeline
management as well Project management, Timesheets, Invoicing, Profitability
Reporting, Customer satisfaction surveys etc

Solving the problem of how to best acquire customers is a great problem fix,
but it creates a whole new bunch of problems around making sure you actually
have really happy customers that are profitable to you (which is just as
important to success and may be even harder to get right)

Anyone have any reccomendations for this?

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jyu
What you're asking for doesn't seem like a something a CRM should do. It seems
more like a managerial accounting question.

First off, for every new customer, you should have built in metrics to figure
out where they came from. For instance, use a different number on your direct
mail pieces, use trackable order links in your e-mails and PPC campaigns.

Secondly, place a system to automatically follow up with existing customers.
E-mail power user tips after 15 days, Phone call after 45 days of use to gauge
satisfaction, etc. For gauging customer satisfaction, you get more useful
feedback from someone on the phone than filling out a survey.

