You need to keep in touch with colleagues, clients, prospects, and customers. If you had all the time and all the staff you could ever need, then you could do this with paper and pen. Or a spreadsheet and email. But you don’t have unlimited resources, so you choose a a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. The object is to stay organized, to document your contacts with all these people, and to make sure the contacts actually get made.

There are essentially three web-based options for CRM.

First, there’s Salesforce, ubiquitous among enterprise companies. Salesforce is a cloud-based CRM system that does an impressive assortment of things. It collects and sorts your sales leads, routes them to the appropriate member of your sales team, offers a variety of dashboards for each department  that integrate with other online applications so you can see Google maps of all a prospect’s locations and their credit info, maintains a content library which allows you to update Power Point presentations –

Most companies aren’t using all the features. In fact, most of the companies we’ve spoken with who are using Salesforce are frustrated with it.

What’s wrong with having a system that does more than you need?

• It increases the learning curve. Most of us use about 15% of the capacity of ready-made solutions — but we still have to learn all of that software before we can tell which 15% is the part we really need. What’s more, the entire staff needs to learn it. Add up the training hours — more for the less tech-savvy in the company — and you’ve got a sizable investment of time.
• It leads to hacks and workarounds. We end up trying to fit the way we work to the software, instead of working in the way that’s best for us and for our company. Salesforce is designed for enterprise-level companies, with multiple departments which may not be well integrated. Using it can force smaller, more agile companies to think like big corporations, which may not be what they want.
• We have to pay for all of it, even though we don’t need all of it. Salesforce runs $65 per user, per month. In a year, your growing company can pay $30,000 to $50,000. And you won’t own anything.

Compare that with Solve360. Solve360 combines CRM and project management capabilities in a simple system of shared virtual whiteboards in a shared online workspace. Sales leads are kept where everyone can see them, not routed to the executive in charge of that division. The main screen lets team members keep track of everything that’s going on, instead of doling out information according to departmental membership. You can upload files, use Google Docs and other familiar systems, and hold discussions right there in the shared space.Your company can use the service for a year for a couple thousand dollars.

We also like the fact that, when we went to get acquainted with the system, the CEO of the company walked us through it. That says something about the company.

Highrise is another nimble tool from 37signals, the outfit that brought you Basecamp. Combining a way to keep track of contacts with clients and prospects and a way to keep track of scheduled tasks, Highrise meshes with your personal GTD system as well as with other tools and systems your company may already use. You can use it on your smartphone to check a client’s previous interactions with your company while you make a call, review all the interactions between two companies, or see where everyone is with assigned tasks related to an individual. You can set up text reminders for future contacts, too. The cost is a small fraction of the cost of using Salesforce.

Highrise and Solve360 are alternatives to Salesforce. They’re more nimble, and give more flexibility. They’re less of an investment, too. Are they going to be perfect for you and your company?

Possibly not. You know a lot about how to make your business successful. What if you could get that information into your CRM? Not only would that improve your immediate workflow and systems for greater productivity and efficiency right now, but it will also increase the value of your company. Integrating that intellectual capital into your software systems makes those systems into assets for your business.

And that’s where the third option comes in. Clevertech can customize the functionality of any of the solutions we’ve discussed to make them perfect for your company’s needs now and in the future. This is one of our services: building things just the way you need them.

If your company is prepared to spend $30-$50k (the cost of using Salesforce for one year), then you should have us build exactly the right thing for you. Need a smaller customization? We can make your CRM work just right for you with that special application. Call us at 1 888 494-1260, or contact us with our simple contact form and we’ll call you.

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