I have tried my share of CRMs over the past 4 years, ranging from SalesForce.com to pen & paper.
CRMs do save time & money, particularly if you have others working for you. People tend to be skeptical of CRMs when they come from a very relationship oriented personal approach to business. In reality, using a CRM does not mean you have to lose your personal touch. All it does is record communications, contact information, and other customized business parameters so your partners or employees don’t look like idiots when they call a client or a lead. (Might I add – it makes you look like the biggest idiot when an employee calls someone you built a relationship with for a sale *after* you already spoke to him about a sale)
Anyhow, I eventually settled on BatchBook from BatchBlue [http://batchblue.com/] for a few key reasons. As others pop up, I will try to share.
- Ease of Use. AJAX is all around so adding tasks, contacts, or editing existing items is a breeze.
- Pricing. For a small company, this is great. You can start at $9.95/month for 1 user or $19.95 for 3 users. So if you have a small business with yourself, a partner, and possibly a contractor/sales person, it is a cheap monthly contract. I would advise against things like SalesForce for startups because of the commitment level and pricing. It isn’t worth it until you are bringing in those millions.
- SuperTags [Customization of Fields]. Yes, it could be better. SalesForce allows you to customize everything, write code etc. etc. But honestly, as a startup, you need to get your product out and make money. Supertags allow you to quickly add new fields with some customizations.
- Easy Exporting. Your data is hosted elsewhere, but you can export it to CSV easily.
There are many reasons you may want to pay more for another product. In my experience, it is tempting to overkill on a CRM system. (I’ve done it) At the same time, it is easy to dismiss the importance of a CRM. *Maybe* you can ignore it if you are still at the development stage or have a handful of clients, but if you have dozens of small clients or you are vetting through leads, a CRM will save you time.