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Ask HN: The best current CRM solution

4 points by kinnth 14y ago

I wanted to get peoples take on the currently available CRM management systems and what works well for everyone. I know salesforce is the "best" but it is very expensive. Is it work investing in? Here are my facts. 1. I'm going to be dealing with a lot of customers / cold calls. roughly 300 - 600 a week. 2. Everything will be web based i.e email, forums 3. I will be managing a team of 10 which needs to hit 10 hot leads per day. 4. I will need good reporting and graphs for management to evaluate my progress. 5. I will need social media integration and finding across all networks. Any ideas?

jnorthrop 14y ago
Check out http://batchbook.com http://batchbook.com. It's a nice application with a focus on integrating email and social networks rather than replacing them. Fairly priced too.
jaz 14y ago
+1 for Salesforce.com. About two years ago I worked on a Salesforce implementation for a political organization. Prior to SF.com, everything lived in Excel spreadsheets on network shares. After some research we went all-in on a SF.com implementation. 65 'sales' staff used it (all with 'unlimited' licenses), with between 200-300 users on an in house application at any given time pushing data into SF via the API. Overall, I was quite happy with SF.com. The dashboards and reports are generally quite powerful, and AppExchange is great for hooking into 3rd party apps. If an app isn't available on AppExchange, you can always write custom code and deploy it to SF.com - which we did quite a bit of. SF also has campaign functionality built in - so if you have 250 hot leads you want to work through, you can dump them into a new campaign and just assign calls from that. I recommend getting a SF.com developer account (they're free and you don't need to talk to a salesperson) and trying out some of the functionality. It'll have test data already in there so you can get a feel for how SF envisions you using their product.
kinnth 14y ago
I think the only real negative with salesforce is the price. It's currently around $100 per person over in the UK and the one we have been looking at is called nimble.com which is only $15 a day. Now really I think money shouldn't be an issue here but it always is. Ill take a look at batchbook too. It's hard to know what to get until you have started using a few.
zeruch 14y ago
I may be biased* but have you looked at SugarCRM? * I am biased, as I do in fact, work at SugarCRM. That said, I used the product before I came to work here, so I actually think its pretty good.

4 points by kinnth 14y ago

jnorthrop 14y ago

Check out http://batchbook.com http://batchbook.com. It's a nice application with a focus on integrating email and social networks rather than replacing them. Fairly priced too.

jaz 14y ago

+1 for Salesforce.com. About two years ago I worked on a Salesforce implementation for a political organization. Prior to SF.com, everything lived in Excel spreadsheets on network shares. After some research we went all-in on a SF.com implementation. 65 'sales' staff used it (all with 'unlimited' licenses), with between 200-300 users on an in house application at any given time pushing data into SF via the API. Overall, I was quite happy with SF.com. The dashboards and reports are generally quite powerful, and AppExchange is great for hooking into 3rd party apps. If an app isn't available on AppExchange, you can always write custom code and deploy it to SF.com - which we did quite a bit of. SF also has campaign functionality built in - so if you have 250 hot leads you want to work through, you can dump them into a new campaign and just assign calls from that. I recommend getting a SF.com developer account (they're free and you don't need to talk to a salesperson) and trying out some of the functionality. It'll have test data already in there so you can get a feel for how SF envisions you using their product.

kinnth 14y ago

I think the only real negative with salesforce is the price. It's currently around $100 per person over in the UK and the one we have been looking at is called nimble.com which is only $15 a day. Now really I think money shouldn't be an issue here but it always is. Ill take a look at batchbook too. It's hard to know what to get until you have started using a few.

zeruch 14y ago

I may be biased* but have you looked at SugarCRM? * I am biased, as I do in fact, work at SugarCRM. That said, I used the product before I came to work here, so I actually think its pretty good.