Evaluating CRM Systems for Start-up - Part 2
My primary use cases
In my earlier post I started to clarify my objectives and the related features. Deal tracking and reporting is much less important at this stage since it’s about pipeline. But it is about getting very granular around reporting activities, prospecting information and so forth.
Tagging
One approach that I’ve used in the past albeit with some challenges (to the point I built my own system to allow this) was tagging. The reason this is important is because there are attributes for accounts and prospects that I want to be able to capture – both ad-hoc and predetermined.
What do I mean by that?
As I build out a territory, I start to identify characteristics such as known installs (they are a BMC shop), external indicators (missed earnings, listed on Inc. 500), and other interesting factors that could turn into the “secret sauce.”
In the past, these indicators would need to be hard-coded into a drop-down. Tags allows me to free-form add them if something comes up while also showing the existing categories through auto-fill.
It also allows multiple attributes, a :many_to relationship so to speak, versus a :has_one relationship. This can also be super-important, both from just a pure efficiency perspective for the prospector (me for now, but someone else in the future), as well as for segmentation purposes.
Contenders
So far, it seems like the best contender is BaseCRM – I’ve been using their tagging feature pretty much since I started and I like how easy it is to input for both accounts and contacts, and then do a search/list with a single click.
I haven’t been able to see a similar feature in Close.IO, and vaguely recollect using it in CapsuleCRM (but since they were bumped down I would need to go back and revisit – nooooo!)
ToutApp sort of has this with the notion of Groups, which would be fine, as well, although it does appear those groups need to be a priori.
So far….
BaseCRM seems to have this, however, it’s lack of integrations discussed above and seemingly limited reporting is stalling me from going all in.