
Ask HN: Recommended CRM solution for a SaaS startup? - eshlomo
Like every startup our customer dwfinition is pretty flexable at this point, so any recommendation on lean and efficient CRM proccess is appriciated
======
wj
What is your sales process going to look like? Figure out your requirements
and it will make your search easier.

I really like Close.io for cold outbound sales. If you're doing social media
then maybe look at Nimble. As someone else said you can get started for free
with Hubspot. Intercom might be something to look at as well if your going for
a more automated process.

You can obviously use Zapier to tie your software together so you can use best
in class software for whatever processes you end up putting in place.

------
iamjbean
I work for Base (getbase.com) and recently put this spreadsheet together with
45 vendor details, links to pricing, etc. Whatever you select, just make sure
it scales with your business and you have a solid plan around
implementation/process. Happy to answer any questions about Base (or any
others if I can).

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10H4p3vg_smsE54bdSJ9U...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10H4p3vg_smsE54bdSJ9U7u8CvCKhRCHry5RPDbUi_Rc/edit?usp=sharing)

------
gk1
Hubspot CRM is free, Hubspot Sales has affordable tiers, and they also have
special discount programs for startups. I don't have any affiliation with
them.

------
patio11
Close.io -- clean, stays out of your way, _very_ extensible API for when you
want to tie it directly into your site/dashboard/various marketing mechanisms.

------
OliverJones
WJ has it right. Figure out your sales process. How many customers? How do you
identify suspects / prospects / likelies? How long is the sales cycle? Do your
first US$50K of deals managing with tools you already own, like a whiteboard
or spreadsheet or quickbooks, or with tools you have to have, like payment
card processors like stripe.com and/or braintree.

Once you've got the beginnings of a process, you'll be much better positioned
to decide on tools.

Tools don't close deals. You do. Go close some. Seriously.

------
dcwca
Salesforce.com because you’ll move to it anyway.

~~~
aantix
Salesforce is the Jira of CRMs..

~~~
91bananas
Jira is so terrible. Just switched from trello to it, so regret it.

~~~
dan_b
Hold my beer:
[https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/engineering/2014/08/m...](https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/engineering/2014/08/meet-
gus-keeping-salesforce-agile.html)

------
PhilipA
We chose Salesforce, and haven't regretted it. The thing you need to keep in
mind if you are doing any semi-complicated B2B sales, is that you will need to
do some customizations, and Salesforce is a king of this. We have heavily
customized it, and especially workflows have been quite helpfull for us.

It does come with a hefty price-tag, but when moving forward you will
eventually outgrow most other CRM solutions, and it will be quite time
consuming to switch later on.

It also helps with recruiting, since most people have used Salesforce
previously.

------
las3r
Office365 comes with a complementary Outlooks Contacts Manager that lives
straight in outlook (well, exchange). It's a great tool for a 1 man shop with
a few simple products and leads.

You need a business premium license though. (10eur/MO)

------
lessclue
ERPNext ([https://erpnext.com](https://erpnext.com))

Open source, self-hosted.

~~~
1ba9115454
This looks really good. That's a lot of functionality.

~~~
lessclue
It indeed is. Check out the open source community edition
[https://erpnext.org](https://erpnext.org)

------
tixocloud
Since you're at the beginning of it all, you might want to take a step back
and think about your sales process. Here are some other questions to ponder as
you're thinking about your CRM:

\- Are you a B2B or a B2C startup?

\- What are your goals for your CRM? (i.e. close more deals, relationship
management, etc.)

\- How many people are in your organization? How many people are in your sales
team?

\- What existing systems do you have already? Do you need the sales data to
feed into other systems?

\- How do you plan on updating your customer information?

\- How skilled is your sales team? Will they primarily be in the office,
working remotely? Do they need additional capabilities from the CRM software?

\- Which communication channels do you expect your customers to be?

Without a clear picture of your organization and your sales process, it's
difficult to pinpoint the right solution. I used to be a consultant and have
seen clients implement all kinds of software without fully understanding their
own capabilities and the software's capabilities.

However, given that you're at the beginning of things, what would make the
most sense might be to try a few different free tools to see what works for
you. I wouldn't spend too much at this point - something simple and easy might
be best. Heck, even Google Sheets or Excel might suffice at this point.

------
jksmith
Whatever you use, here's the trick we learned from trying to use Msft Dynamics
XRM: Do not make the core of your application a bunch of custom functoids.
Also plan custom changes very carefully; always use what's out of the box
first. Also, don't hesitate to hire pro consultants; they will reinforce what
I just stated.

Even given all that, would I use XRM again? No. It just isn't there yet for a
large enterprise app.

------
turbosales
Turbosales.io is a good one [disclaimer - I made it]

It's great because it bundles mass email, automated email and a CRM into one
so you don't have to run around stitching a bunch of pieces together.

Once you make an account send me a message or call me (number is in the app)
and I'll work out a special deal [basically free till it's actually bringing
in revenue] for you since you're a startup.

------
matchmike1313
Hubspot is great since their product is designed with marketing in mind, this
makes it a great fit for SaaS companies as they heavily rely on digital
marketing channels to grow. They also have some great integrations with tools
such as Proposify, Lucky Orange, etc. Our SaaS company just switched to
Hubspot from Streak and we are happy to have made the jump.

~~~
justboxing
Thanks. Which plan are you on, if you don't mind me asking.

The free plan only has 5.5 of the 32 features in the next paid tier ( 600$ /
year).

Thinking of using it to market my side projects.

Also, did you start with free tier for your SaaS and then upgraded once you
got sales, leads, or did you directly start with 1 of the paid plans?

~~~
matchmike1313
We are on the Pro plan. They were having a promo so I think we got it for
$8500 with some add-ons and more contacts. Yeah, depending on your use-case
the other plans before pro can be somewhat limited in their features. I would
recommend using Hubspot only once you can do Pro or higher with add-ons like
the social media automation. I could see it being useful thou if you could
lump multiple side-projects into it and streamline the marketing process. We
started with the paid plan coming off of Streak. We simply outgrew Streak as
we were using that plus Proposify, Google Docs, Mailchimp, Drip, etc. and
pulling everything together with Zapier, so it was just getting complex.

~~~
justboxing
Thanks Mike! Very useful info.

------
fillskills
Use the cheapest and easiest one to install. Once you use it you will start
finding more about what you need in CRM. If you are really a startup, it
shouldnt be that hard to switch to a different one later. We started with
excel files, then used Zoho for 1 year before switching to SalesForce. Based
on size and scenarios, I would recommend all of them.

------
tmikaeld
[https://www.group-office.com](https://www.group-office.com)

Basic version is open source but the premium is only 200$ a year if you self
host it. They have out of the box Debian packages so it's easy to run. It's
the most feature packed crm we have found and we have used it for clients the
last 8 years.

------
hayksaakian
Google spreadsheets are pretty good

once you really need automation features, then something like insightly or
hubspot can be useful

~~~
wslh
Yes, I agree. I tried multiple CRMs in the past like SugarCRM and Vtiger and
the main issue was not the lack of features but the time you should spend to
integrate with your company flow (e.g. adding customers from your inquiry
managing systems).

This issue happens mainly in small companies with tiny sales and marketing
teams.

------
ramanujank
Zoho all the way! (Zoho fanboy here) Main reasons: 1\. Good coverage in terms
of features and customization. 2\. Pure play on Zoho is very advantageous.
There are numerous apps, products that play well, which are deeply integrated
(Survey, Sign, Campaigns, etc). 3\. Amazing price point!

~~~
shrikant
Probably worth mentioning that you work for Zoho as well...

~~~
ramanujank
Yes! Ran a couple of small businesses before and was a proud Zoho user then.
One thing led to another, work for them FT now and continue to be a (proud-er)
Zoho user. :)

------
ggillas
Streak CRM, fantastic if on G Suite.

~~~
weston
Thanks for the shoutout! For OP - Streak (YC S11) works on both Gmail and G
Suite and we have both free and paid versions. Give me a holler at
weston(at)streak(dot)com with any questions! I'm on the support side and would
be glad to help.

------
nip
Have you looked into Pipedrive?

~~~
briteside
We use Pipedrive at Faraday and love it — it's the Trello of CRM

------
kartikkumar
Whatever you do, don't over complicate it with systems and processes. Do what
works today and possibly tomorrow, because your startup is going to go through
plenty of changes anyway. We started out using Google Sheets and then migrated
to Asana (free), which we've sorta "hacked" to do CRM the way that works for
us. One thing I've learned is to not waste too much time in these choices
because it's not the core value in your org, at least not at an early stage.

------
nodesocket
I've been using [https://agilecrm.com](https://agilecrm.com) for my startup
and it's worked well. They even have a free plan.

------
forzo
We are using FreshSales.io. so far, it is good.
[https://www.freshsales.io](https://www.freshsales.io)

~~~
nivasravi
Cool Forzo. Nivas from the Freshsales Team. Thanks for the mention.

------
nivasravi
Have you tried using Freshsales CRM? - [https://www.freshworks.com/freshsales-
crm](https://www.freshworks.com/freshsales-crm) Has AI-based lead scoring,
built-in phone, email, activity capture, workflows and more. A lot of SaaS
startups have been using it and found it to be really helpful for their teams.

[Disclaimer: I work for Freshsales (Freshworks)]

~~~
mlo
Why the new domain? Was there an issue with the io?

~~~
nivasravi
Both work. Just that the product under Freshworks will move under the domain.

------
vikas_jha
If you want to follow Predictable Revenue ( by Aaron ross) give Alore CRM a
try ( [https://crm.alore.io](https://crm.alore.io)) .

Alore CRM offers everything needed to run a sales team at scale - from finding
business email addresses to running automated drip campaigns to monitoring the
performance of sales teams.

We have special price for startups with less than 5 team member.

------
wicha
We put together a free CRM designed for startups that works 100% over Slack.
Sudo.ai, is free for our own CRM version and integrates with Salesforce. It's
zero-input collects everything from your email and calendar and automagically
organizes it on a CRM. Disclaimer: CEO founder here.

------
csandstedt
You might setup a Trello board as your CRM:
[https://trello.com/b/lrAIa0JW/sales-crm-
pipeline](https://trello.com/b/lrAIa0JW/sales-crm-pipeline)

------
rrrhys
WORKetc[1] is pretty feature packed and their support is supposedly second to
none. (Disclaimer: I have worked with them in the past)

1: [https://www.worketc.com](https://www.worketc.com)

------
jocke12
We just founded [https://prospekt.ai](https://prospekt.ai) for automatically
finding and contacting leads. Might be a good fit for you. Get in touch for an
HN discount.

------
fstephany
It really depends of your sales flow. In any case, I've heard a lot of people
are happy with [https://prospect.io/](https://prospect.io/)

------
jdormit
[Disclaimer: I work for HubSpot]

HubSpot has a startup "scholarship" program, I think it is a 90% discount. Not
sure about the details for applying, but it's worth looking into.

------
gerenuk
Check out salesflare.com

------
mikaelhernrup
[https://lime-crm.com](https://lime-crm.com) Enterprise ready without the
bloat and bullshit of Salesforce.

------
poof_he_is_gone
[https://getsynap.com](https://getsynap.com), awesome email sharing and
pipeline building tools.

------
dedalus
Stride( [https://www.stride.com/](https://www.stride.com/))

------
eshlomo
Thanks for the replies, havnt tried any of those. Adding to the list

------
goatherders
Agile CRM is my preferred, particularly because it sucks in Gmail.

~~~
dantiberian
I read that as "It automatically imports from Gmail", not "It is bad when
using it with Gmail"?

------
cygned
Using Central Station CRM over here.

------
krallja
I've heard of Highrise (came out of 37signals) and Salesforce (because they
put their name on buildings in many major cities)

------
riemannzeta
Prosperworks

~~~
sr3d
We use PropsperWorks and it works great. Amazing integration with GMail.
However, watch out for their contract. We had to let go of some sales people
and we're still trying to re-negotiate our seats with them.

------
jimjimjim
whiteboard

email

spreadsheet

~~~
danielcmeek
I just open to beta at Wooster, [https://wooster.io/](https://wooster.io/)
after getting frustrated with salesforce - it has integrated calling and
automated workflows.

------
anacleto
Close.io or getbase.com

