CRM Hunt

As a team grows the needs for organized reporting & documenting rises higher than ever before, adding more work and less time in hand it’s a great deal of challenge to find a solution that works in a team environment. Now adding multi-platform workplace with mixture of PCs and Macs, the ad-hoc workflow becomes a disaster.

At dots & lines we’ve been looking for a suiting CRM for about a month now.

Our requirements:

• Contacts Management with E-mail client integration
• Calendars & Event Notes(calls, meetings, etc…)
• Leads, Prospects, and Opportunities Management
• Tasks & Project Handling & Reporting
• File repository

Being a Web Consultancy firm, first thing comes in one’s mind is, well, it has to be online, you know, the religion. But that was to an aim. No IT work, no Storage problems to be handled at our end, and best of all accessible through a Browser, no brainer out there. But we still evaluated that choice. The downsides of online apps are:

• unnecessary traffic & Imagine sharing a file in the same office would require a round trip to a server in the cloud and back
• the limitations in Filesize in uploads(it’s really a headache using another app for file handling and uploads)

But then again, it’s online, so it’s fun and natural to us.

Evaluating our choices, note that we’re looking for a subcription based service where we do not need to install any application nor in office or on our online servers.

So the obvious HighRise came first, since it is in the same circle of our interests, but then it has to be working side by side with BaseCamp for it to form a minimal CRM. It’s 37Signals thingy that made us first think of it, the developer mind.

But then thinking about the users who will be using these apps, not so geeky and not so all jazzed up with whatever the Blogosphere knows, Sales people who want to sell. So we tried out SalesForce, being it the dominant subsription based CRM (Credibility in the Enterprise world). We tested the app for about a month with the demo versions, not so bad, with a few tweaks it could become something that we could customize. Neat! We had options, unlike BaseCamp & Highrise.

While we’re still on the looks, I just remembered Microsoft’s Dynamics; Hosted Solutions, and they’ve got their CRM ported there too, now that’s an important one to check, waiting for the trial version to be enabled to us. Since I looked at the Enterprise Market(don’t get me wrong, these solutions are for SMBs too but by the Enterprise leaders), even SAP has an on-demand CRM service, getting interesting. We’re still in the looks, had a good experience with a CRM of choice?

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