I was curious if people would be interested in an application that sat on top of Highrise which provided sales lead generation, pipelines, analytics, etc?

I’m considering building something like that. Shoot me an email at mike.loll AT gmail DOT com if you want to chat about it. I’m not harvesting emails, etc, just doing some market research for myself.

Thanks.

mike

Based on previous forum discussions I would say this would be welcome, but the big one for me would be some sort of Ad Hoc reporting.

I would be very interested in this feature. I lead an international nonprofit and am attempting to use High Rise to manage our “development” pipeline … but find it missing “salesforce” type capability. I even relooked at SalesForce tonight given my frustrations with HR in this regard. If you build it … ;-)

Having used Salesforce, which I love for its robustness but do not love so much for its cost, this is something I would be very interested in.

We would be very interested in this as well. Particularly if we could configure milestones by Tag. We’re manually looking at doing this, but if we could automate a way to track tag “progress,” from

Lead to Prospect to Contract Negotiation to Client

That would be good.

PM me for further feedback please.

We just had to write another $1200 annual check to Salesforce for another year… to accomplish just 20% more that what Highrise already does for us.

Our sales prospects are the top 25 advertising/marketing agencies in each state with revenues over $20M. We basically setup a list to prospect to, contact, develop relationships, and identify opportunities to present sponsorship proposals for our state news properties StateNewslines

We manage over 500 business/professional contacts/relationships in Highrise and just love it… The only thing we really use SF for is to identify opportunities, (Opp name / Type / Amount / Stage / Status) so we can drive action & follow-up to different stages of the sales cycle. So to this point we’ve just had our sales/marketing team to run two split systems – which bites.

We’d love to see something simple, perhaps 10 custom fields, say 6 text, 3 numbers, 2 dates, that we could use to organize our own little follow-up system from.. I’d almost rather see that than ask 37’s team to try and design the ‘magic bullet’ for SFA – just a few extra fields that would probably spawn a lot of creativity from users and open this app up to a whole other level of user innovation, etc.

Custom Fields would work great to accomplish just about all we would need. Sure it would require some custom dev on our part, but SalesForce cost us about 20-25x what it cost Paul, so there’s some room in there for that.

If you are writing your own application, you can use the Background (About) as a location to store custom fields in INI, XML, or JSON format.

The API can do most things except access to Dates, membership of Cases, and enumeration of Task categories.

Cheer

I agree with Paul and Jeremy.

Custom fields would be an EXCELLENT addition to Highrise. It would give our team everything we’re looking for in a simple CRM.

A suggestion would be to allow the end user to select the type of data they wanted to store for each new custom field (ie: text, date, number, etc)

Ahhhhhhh <s>

An array of custom fields (name=value), maybe. But strings only, guys, let’s be reasonable.

Cheers

Custom fields, some kind of pipeline = goodbye salesforce.

Have you looked at PipeLine Deals? (www.pipelinedeals.com)

We are down to choosing one or the other and the ability to produce reports on moving clients through the sales process is a real plus for Pipeline, although it does not have all the other goodness that Highrise does…

I just finished evaluating pipeline vs HR and chose HR because in my experience the key is whether your salespeople will USE the system (they tell you they do, but they really don’t), and I felt HR was so much more user friendly that it had a higher likelihood of succeeding in the organization. That’s ultimately more important than fancy pipeline reports (though I wouldn’t mind having those in HR!!!)

This topic is great. I’m using Salesforce and hate it. Highrise has everything I need except for the sales forecasting. I don’t need anything fancy. Just a few fields I can customize and somewhere I can note won or lost. Basic reporting, too. (total won/lost, activity, etc). Have the HR folks mentioned adding these types of features?

Have you looked at Tactile CRM – http://www.tactilecrm.com – I’m evaluating a few products at the moment and that seems to manage opportunities and sales info/pipelines in a more ‘commercial’ manner.

We have a pipeline tool for Highrise in development. We should be opening it up for beta users in April. You can sign up at http://skyscrapersales.com/ if you want to be notified when we are ready to start testing.

We just added PipelineDeals to our CRM usage, with the intent of migrating over eventually. Our first choice would be to have 37Signals build a kick-butt deal tracking, opportunity management, and reporting system on top of Highrise (they could even charge more money for it and we’d pay). PLD has a great, crisp user interface but it’s not quite as good as Highrise’s. PLD is fun to use, but Highrise is a blast to use.

I just finished an extensive CRM search, trying to find something that had the interface of Highrise but did the extra things we needed. After looking around and asking other experts, I learned that most browser-based CRMs are near identical in their clunkiness and awkwardness. Only a couple stood out, and no others came close to the UI design in Highrise and PLD.

I know you guys at 37S are into feature-stripped stuff, and that’s good, software should be simpler. But, opportunity management, deal tracking, and reporting deserves a 37Signals polish to it because the stuff out there doesn’t stack up. These aren’t superfluous features, they’re necessary ones. And I’m hoping and praying that you guys decide to add them to Highrise’s feature set because I know they’ll be done excellently.

DITTO. WHAT Tim Courtney SAID

We are writing code at this very moment on our Pipeline tool for Highrise. Patience is a virtue :) We hope to have it in beta in April. Seriously, we’d love input from people with real problems to solve. If you have anything you think we should know contact via http://skyscrapersales.com/contact

if you make it like this all of the cool people will love you:

Not looking
LEAD (0%)

Curious (0%)
SUSPECT

Goal shared (10%)
PROSPECT

Access (20%)
CHAMPION

Evaluating (50%)
OPPORTUNITY

Verbal (90%)
WIN/LOSS

+1 Much needed for us. Looking forward to seeing what COD and company comes up with.

just started using Highrise and first and only frustration so far was this one, ie i need some very basic Pipeline stuff. I can use tags to work out what products my customers have and what products my customers or my prospects might want to buy but i cant find a way of recording a few basics like the value of the sale, the stage in teh sale process and teh likelyhood of a win – that woudl be all i would need to drive out a neat picture.

anyone come up with any workrounds? i have used Cases with a Note for each sale opportunity along with a textual descriptio of the above, but it feels very clumsy to do it this way

37S did a survey recently asking what features users would like to see if they build a pipleline/opportunity tool. They’ll never say if they are going to do it but if enough people ask it might help them decide to, if they haven’t already. As a salesforce user who would love to move to HR for one of my businesses, I hope they do and soon!

Hi Raw,

You might want to take a look at Tactile CRM it has a lot of what Highrise does but deals with opportunities and sales. I have been working with that for a while now and they seem to offer a bit of a roadmap too.

Dave

Dave
Thanks for that, the sales stuff is important for me, if you have used both can you give any pointers on where I would lose functionality? ie key stuff Highrise does that Tactile doesnt?
raw