After a few months of (far too much – wife) cycling I now find myself employed again! (as of 4th July anyway) I had a very long and productive final interview yesterday (that’s pushing it a bit, we sat around for 7 hours discussing the business) one of the tasks I have been given is to find a reasonable CRM system for the company to manage the sales process, quoting, contact recording etc. Currently they are using a spreadsheet however this is becoming a bit ignored and under used.

My last outfit was a mega corp which spent 10’s of thousands on licences for salesforce.com, as this is a small business the budget is less but as I will be the main operator of the system I want something that is going to be simple to manage and effective.

What are other people using? We operate Mac’s and ideally the software should be available for around 7-8 people to access at any time.

The answer is probably still salesforce.com.

It’s a cloud service that you pay per user for, so cost is low for a small number of people and as you add extra it’s a known and manageable amount for each one. If you can get away with fewer “enterprise” features then the licences are cheaper too.

What he said.

Small outfits probably get the best value out of cloud offerings like that.

We use Pipedrive and it works perfectly for what we need

Wether it does for you depends on a lot of things really, worth a look though.

If you go to a cloud based system, make sure you’ve got a very good internet connection. We switched to an online one and it was very hard to use due to ‘slow’ connection (slow being 16Mbps). Only half a dozen users as well, though the same connection was also serving the rest of the company.

Nobody is in same office, so no drain on the internet connection.

I shall investigate their websites for costs and offerings.

Salesforce.com would be my recco as well. Does what it says on the tin, nicely scalable.

Just sat and watched all the ‘demo’ videos on salesforce.com, it was like an episode of the apprentice.

+1 for salesforce, with a clear development plan. It can do pretty much anything you want, which is great, and really really bad.

SFDC is amazing but needs careful planning to get the best out of it.

There are other options for an SME. Check out Greenberg’s advice. He know’s his CRM onions.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/and-the-winners-of-the-2016-crm-watchlist-are/

Plenty of options out there, Nimble, Capsule, Highrise. All SaaS, all monthly subscriptions so clear price plans.

Also good to try and plan long term – do you think the CRM will be where the marketing will be based out of or is it primarily to track sales etc.

We use Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

It’s a pig, but nice and easy to implement for the IT guys who never have to use it!

I currently use SF as that’s what the company uses, but when I had the opportunity to switch away from SF a few years ago, I found that Zoho was the best choice.

Zoho is (was?) about 1/3 of the cost per licence and did everything we wanted – the changeover was about as seamless as these things can ever be, but the flexibility and ‘user defined-ness’ was far greater.

it would be worth getting a sales team from each to talk to you, but YOU need to know the system first.

edit: and you need to understand why the spreadsheet is being ignored – a CRM is only as good as the folk using it. If the team don’t record stuff, then any system will gradually be less and less relevant. That also means that you need your sales team to have enough admin time to keep the CRM up to date.

How about start from the beginning and show them you know what you’re doing by gathering the Requirements….. then buying Salesforce. It seems to be ubiquitous, the IBM OF CRM.

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In no particular order :

SalesForce
Workbooks
Microsoft Dynamics
Whatever Sage’s option is.

You do realise you don’t start work until July 4th don’t you 🙂

No idea what’s good or bad but you might find this useful? https://zapier.com/zapbook/#sort=popular&filter=crm

Don’t even look at the solutions until you fully understand the problem. How you do that for a company at which you have yet to start, I’m unsure.

Rachel

I agree with Rachel, but if you are looking in advance check out Zoho. Its cloud based but is free to start with and then you pay as you expand it and need more users/features.

It’s really flexible and pretty much everything can be adjusted to suit, even the layout of the screens.

I’ve used loads of CRMs in the past and this one stands out from the crowd for small businesses.

Depends upon how much you want to pay, number of users, whether you can change business process’ to fit etc…

Alternate options here

You could put Capsule on your list (linked above). Cheap/free to try. Talks to Mailchimp & Freshbooks, which is nice.

My company is in the middle of implementing ACCESS CRM ERP, it doesn’t even feature in that list up there/\ – I’ve been involved in various “scoping” sessions, and we’ve realised despite being pretty thorough that what we asked for is not what we’re getting!! If the company says they know what you want first time round, even second then they probably don’t..

“change business processes to fit” that’s hilarious, and in a sentence summarises why so many IT projects fail.

Small business here and they specialise in our industry (signs and print) but they do also go into other industries.
clarity from Touch Systems.

it’s licensed per user, cloud and mobile based, modular so each user can have the modules they need. Tees into accounting packages.
UK company and if you can understand the Brummie staff pretty quick to respond to any issues.

Clarity also has free download for one user, Mac compatible and does more than just the quoting and customer info management, also ordering, job sheets and pod (signed delivery note or tablet based) depending on the business this could be useful.

Nobody gets fired for buying Salesforce. BUT, its a bit of a beast, moderately expensive and if your current team are used to using spreadsheets a bit of a transformation. We use pipedrive for its simplicity. Even convincing the people who have used s/sheets for 20 yrs to change to that is an uphill struggle. Good luck.

We use Salesforce at work. Did take a lot of customisation (which you can do yourself) to make it fit how we worked.

Dynamics CRM Online here – I’d struggle to recommend it for small company. Its very customisable but you need developers to do anything clever. Its limited in the integration with other web based products out there in a way that salesforce and others aren’t.

The critical thing is to find out what its for – if its just for managing the sales process, opportunities , wins etc and doesn’t need integration with accounts or customer service then zoho, pipeline or sugarCRM are good options to look at. All pretty cheap really.

the most important thing I think for sales management tool is to make sure its used – and that means making it available on a smartphone. If the sales team don’t use it/ use it as an excuse then its doomed.

Salesforce appears to be an irregular shape that fits in no one’s hole. The development environment is a joke, the documentation makes msdn look detailed and it’s so, so slow. If you sell widgets then I’m sure it can work but for anything difficult its a pain.

We use dynamics crm with experlogix as a quoting tool. Really good, but as previously mentioned, you need developers to do anything complicated. We looked at salesforce and the stumbling block we had was that they essentially own your data, so if you want to pull the plug on it, you have that bridge to cross.

If it’s very basic CRM then Busycontacts and Busycal together do a reasonable job. Licences are about £40 a seat if you are VAT registered (that’s total not each app). But as above check what the team needs first.