1) Which CRM are you using? 2) Why did you choose it? 3) Any problems you are having with it?
We are a SaaS company that sells one product in a 3-tiered pricing strategy. We don't have a sales team at the moment, but will be building one out. Thanks!
2(a). Because all my data are belong to me. (sic) (AKA I don't want to be held hostage to monthly fees in order to keep my business going. That's why I abandoned 37 Signals.)
2(b). Because we are all-Mac and Daylite is kind of all there is on the Mac.
2(c). It has an iPhone app - this is the killer feature of Daylite for me. It is actually better than the desktop software. This is a $50/year item, not a one-time purchase, which is the primary reason I am always looking for an alternative. Do you hear that, www.marketcircle.com? Abuse your customers with pricing and they'll constantly be looking for the door. Which I am.
2(d). Because in fact Daylite works quite well for a team of 5 to be up to date on all of the projects and opportunities going on in the office.
3(a). Daylite's ability to sync remotely with my MacBook has been shit, frankly. The so-called "offline" capability isn't capable.
3(b). Daylite's ability to sync between its own contact database and Address Book, and between its own calendar and iCal has been shit, frankly. Marketcircle blames this on Apple's sync services. 3,500 contacts? C'mon. It's not that much.
What I'm looking for - I watch for stuff that will plug into Google Apps and will have an app for an Android phone. I'd be gone in a second, as soon as I'm comfortable that I have control over my own data utterly and completely.
Tried Salesforce, Zoho. UI is crap, complex, overdone for our purposes.
Breathing and blood. Hard for humans to outsource comfortably. Same with business - finance and CRM. While I and happy/eager to go to the cloud, I won't do so until the data exit is simple and trivial.
/Phil
Prior to that stage, I stick to email and Google Docs. Highrise doesn't really work for me and I guess I just like my personal process better.
SFDC may be expensive, but:
1. Every (good) sales person you hire was probably using it at their last job. 2. It's one less thing you need to manage -- trust me, you don't want to risk losing your customer/lead data. 3. Why innovate on the sales process? SFDC may be clunky, but the lead -> opportunity -> account process is pretty straightforward.
Feel free to ping me directly if you want to discuss further. I've walked a bunch of companies through this process over the past few years, happy to help if I can.
We're working on a fully email integrated simple CRM. If you want to be a part of our free private beta (to be released late next month) please let me know. My email is in my profile.