CRM Heaven or CRM Hell? Seven Options Reviewed From the Trenches
Why does CRM software have to suck?
The problem is that everyone means something slightly different when they say “CRM.”
Personally, I just need a quick, streamlined way to track contacts and email. I could care less about inventory, HR, or forecasting tools.
But you might have a sales force to manage. And so you need tools to track your pipeline and compare the performance of your reps (so you’ll know when to yell at them).
This article will give you a brief overview of 7 of the most popular web-based CRM packages. But that’s nothing special. You can find “comparison” reviews all over the net.
But we went one step further. We found and interviewed actual users of these applications, to give you a little perspective “from the trenches.”
Batchbook
You want a simple crm, but you need to customize it to fit your special needs.
Most of the simple CRM options limit the types of information you can store about a contact, or a task.
Suppose your company sells a blog engine. You might want to know if your customers are running your software on windows or linux .
In most simple CRM applications, you would have to add this as a “note” to the customer’s record. But you can’t run queries, or generate mailing lists from a “note” field.
Batchbook is the simple CRM with custom fields. And their implementation, called “super-tags” is extraordinarily flexable.
The concept of SuperTags is just amazing. It really expands the power and flexibility of the service. Any tag can be come a supertag. At first I was reluctant to create supertags, but once I “broke the ice” then I got excited about just what I could do with them.
Batchbook starts at $9.95/month for 3 users and unlimited contacts.
Salesforce
You need it all: reports, quotes, inventory, ad tracking. And you want to get it from a grown-up company that won’t go out of business any time soon.
We switched to Salesforce. From what we have seen, the best options are Salesforce and Zoho, but Zoho lacked one single feature important to us (Autoresponder).
I have to admit, Salesforce.com surprised me. I’d expected it to be just another piece of enterprise bloatware, but it’s really not that bad.
It’s easy to navigate, looks decent, and is pretty responsive (compared with applications like SugarCRM). And as long as you run Outlook, it integrates with your email.
The price is reasonable – the small business edition is $9/month per seat. If you need some of the more advanced features, that can jump to $50 or $100 though.
Netsuite
You need CRM, accounting, e-commerce, and HR software. And you need it all to work together.
Netsuite must have been invented by Ron Popeil. It slices. It dices. You can essentially run your entire business using nothing but Netsuite. Of course, all of this adds up to one serious price tag.
It’s easy to use, and allows me to do everything I need to manage my business in one place.
My only complaints would be: 1) expensive, 2) more powerful than I know what to do with, and 3) a bit more complex than it needs to be.
There are so many amazing things that it does, but I just don’t know what to do with it all. I don’t have the time to sit and teach myself and I certainly don’t have the time to take any of their training courses. I hope to do so in the future however.
I wish they had a scaled-down or “lite” version that did just the things I want it to do.
Highrise
You want simple contact, task and project tracking that fits easily into to your everyday workflow.
I have a love-hate relationship with 37signals.
On the one hand – they make good software. On the other hand, their ability to amass a clone army of uncritical, raving, (and somewhat snide) fanboys is a little unsetteling.
But after so many of my friends recommend Highrise, I gave it another look.
If what you need is simple contact & task management, this is a jewel of an application. The workflow is seamless. But don’t expect hardcore CRM features any time soon.
I switched over to Highrise approximately 4 months ago and once I bcc’d all my email to it, found it as a great way to quickly get things moving and keep them (mostly) up to date.
Oprius
You’re a solo operation. You want one application for email, calendaring, contact management, and sales automation.
Oprius is meant to be an online ACT! replacement. It has a decent webmail client, support for mailing lists, lead capture, and much more. But the interface is (for the most part) simple and intuitive.
I really love Oprius. That’s why it broke my heart to have to leave it. I didn’t realize until about 2 weeks in, that there is no support for multiple users, and no plans to add it.
Sadly, that was a deal-breaker for me.
Oprius is $15 / month.
SugarCRM
You need a fully featured CRM that you can host on your own servers, and extend with custom modules.
There’s no denying it – SugarCRM does a lot. Webmail, email marketing, inventory, you name it. On a feature-by-feature basis, Sugar even beats salesforce.com.
But the features do get in the way of usability. Compared with Basecamp or Oprius, SugarCRM just seems slow and clunky.
The general movement among the entrepreneurs I spoke with, seems to be away from Sugar.
While I think SugarCRM is a great option for organizations larger than mine, for my team (me fulltime, 3-4 contractors as needed), it was a bit excessive and cumbersome.
Forget about Sugar CRM. Check out their documentation an a topic such as Autoresponder and read the angry comments of long term users in the support area. On SugarCRM I even found a field in the customer database where I was not able to enter my email address as it was to long We installed it, tested it for four hours and removed it immediately.
SugarCRM is free if you host it yourself. It’s $40/month if you use their hosted version.
BrowserCRM
You want a self-hosted CRM, with a ton of features, but a little friendlier than SugarCRM.
BrowserCRM is a commercial alternative to sugar. It’s a self-hosted, full-bore CRM. The user interface is a lot snappier, and uses YUI AJAX components to give a semi-desktop experience.
I was using BrowserCRM for a while, and was fairly impressed with it as an overall application, but I ended up going back to Highrise as my main need currently is basic sales lead tracking. BrowserCRM provides this, but with all of it’s additional features it turned out to be rather bulky to use for my purposes.
If I were looking for a full-featured CRM package, I’d probably still be using it. Compared to SugarCRM, which I’ve used a bit in the past, it seems to have similar features, and less of a learning curve.
The first 2 seats are free, but after that, it starts at around $100 per seat.
That’s All Folks
Well, that’s it. We’ve now officially covered every CRM in the world.
What’s that? Did I miss one? Let us know!
