Do you foresee Highrise as a CRM system alternative? If so, and i you do, I’d like see some sales & marketing related features I’d like to see.

1) At the end of a week, I wanna know how many calls were made, how many thank you cards were sent, etc etc. I wanna see pretty charts, excel type breakdowns, etc.

2) I also want to be able to move my contacts from my CRM (ZOHO) into highrise. I’ve got 5,000 or so contacts in my CRM system that I’d like to move into Hghrise. Vcards are just not going to cut it.

3) Third, how bout opportunities/potentials for sales forecasting.

4) This one is not 100% sales/marketing related. It’s more general. I’ve always thought that CRM systems should have playlists. Basically be able to create a list of people… so for whatever reason. For sales person it might be most important people to call every month. For a CEO who is visiting New York, it might be his/her important contacts that he wants to touch when there. Just think music playlists.

5) Customized data fields for contacts. For example, this weekend I categorized my contacts based on how they feel about me. Another example is their revenue level. Another is how many employees they have.

If I think of more, I’ll be back :D

~ mel

Melvin Ram
CEO, Volcanic Internet Marketing
Direct: (916) 743-9369
Email: melvin@volcanicmarketing.com
Web: www.volcanicmarketing.com

I get the feeling your request will be dismissed as “bloat” and not “getting real” using an intentionally lite product, which is for contact management, not full CRM. You could build these dashboard style reports using the upcoming API. But I will give a second vote to “Customized data fields for contacts”. Adding a fixed amount of Attributes – as Tags can be added – could really help create some funky applications with the API.

Well I hope it won’t be dismissed as not “getting real” although I haven’t read the book to really know what that is suppose to mean in the 37 context. Let me back all of my requests with why I think they are important.

1) What gets measured, gets done. If I don’t know have a way to see my overall progress… or the progress of my people, than we’re just spinning tires in the dark. Sales organizations base a lot of things on these reports… such as hiring, firing, rewarding, etc.

2) I hope the need for this is obvious. Who else finds this important?

3) Potentials/Opportunties are projects in sales. They create a list of tasks and urgency around a particular contact. Without this, when you go into a contact, you’ll have a bunch of unrelated tasks & notes showing… connected only by the fact that they involve the same contact. Context will be missing. I haven’t seen Cases yet… so maybe cases can handle this… Anyone think Cases can handle this?

4) This is important because once you have a manual or automatic list of people, you can go back to them easily… and frequently do stuff with them. Maybe they are your best customers… and you want to call them every 2 weeks. It has many applications.

5) This seems important for obvious reasons. What kind of data would you put into your custom fields?

~ mel

Melvin Ram
CEO, Volcanic Internet Marketing
Direct: (916) 743-9369
Email: melvin@volcanicmarketing.com
Web: www.volcanicmarketing.com

In my experience, a lot of companies who implement a CRM build in features for granularity and tracking that don’t get used consistently (if at all) and really just add a layer of complexity that makes people not use the tool at all.

Highrise to me seems like a tool that is designed to be used in the real world – make it simple, people will use it, and we’ll have the info we really need.

If your need is for a full CRM with sales cycle tracking and forecasting then there are other great tools out there that do that. Personally, I just need a place to keep all my stuff.

Not that there aren’t areas for improvement or features to be added but I would hate to see highrise turn into Maximizer or ACT (or Salesforce)

SB

If you need a full CRM system with sales pipeline charts and forecasting and financial tools you probably won’t find Highrise adequate. There are plenty of products out there that will work well for you.

If you don’t need all that other stuff and instead just need a tool to keep track of who you talk to, what was said, and what to do next, Highrise is likely the tool for you.

I personally don’t want to see Highrise trying to be a SalesForce.com clone, though I would like to see some seamless integration between the two.

In regards to #2. You can import a vcard with multiple people in it. If you can’t export this kind of thing from salesforce, you can export whatever they have and import it into an intermediate app that can export group vcards (like Apple Address Book).

All of the pretty charts, etc in Netsuite and Salesforce get in my way.

However, if you are a salesperson who is managing a pipe full of 50 or more leads/prospects (I think this qualifies as a person who needs “to keep track of who you talk to, what was said, and what to do next”), you absolutely positively must be able to monitor/filter by the status of your opportunities. Configurable fields (for deal amount), global search (not just contact name), batch-editable tags (for deal status), and data exporting are a requisite.

Time-stamping for when a tag was added to a contact/company would be a nice-to-have.

I believe you allude elsewhere to some of this as potentially forthcoming. That’s great to hear. If you haven’t already figured out how batch-editing will work, I encourage you to think about how Flickr does this. I think they have nailed it.

Pictures are neat, but I don’t have pics for 99.5% of my contacts. I am surprised that it gets such prominence.

Email feature is cool. Way to go.

UI is awesome, of course.

As is, would work great for the support side of our business, and with the above mentioned additons, we’d love to try it for our whole business.

I think it is a good PIM but that that great of a CRM. I had high hopes for it.

You also might want to look at Pipeline Deals although there are some free CRM tools out there I find all of them too clumsy.

cheers
-david

www.ditzlerphoto.com

I like the simplicity of this and all the 37signals products and that is my biggest complaint with the CRM (sugarcrm) we use is my sales people think its too complicated so they don’t want to use it. I would however love to see OPPORTUNITIES added to this. That one thing would make it a viable sales tool. Otherwise its not really something my business could use and i’m sure other people are in the same boat

Why not just tag anyone who’s an opportunity as “Opportunity”?

That’s what we’re trying to do, only we are using tag per service type (we’re in services business) per sales stage. For example “ServiceType1 opportunity”, “ServiceType2 lead”, “ServiceType1 target” etc. We’re also tagging per industry type. Would be nice if we could filter by multiple tags…

you absolutely positively must be able to monitor/filter by the status of your opportunities. Configurable fields (for deal amount), I think Jason had it right with
bq. Why not just tag anyone who’s an opportunity as “Opportunity”?

I hadn’t thought about tagging my leads in terms of potential sales amount (although I hear the big D’UH!” in my head). So now, maybe the tags “Lead $$$$” “Lead $$$” “Lead $$” and “Lead $” will be implemented!

Tags are really flexible. I use them to keep track of who referred me to someone. “Via John Smith” or “Via Kelly Rainer” allow me to see everyone I know who was referred by John Smith or Kelly Rainer, for example.

Great idea, Jason! Thank you!

2) I also want to be able to move my contacts from my CRM (ZOHO) into highrise. I’ve got 5,000 or so contacts in my CRM system that I’d like to move into Hghrise. Vcards are just not going to cut it.

I don’t see why it would be a big deal for 37 to enable import of contacts from a CSV file.

Heh. It’s not like we have CSV import capabilities that we’re just holding back and refusing to turn on. We certainly want to do it, but it’s not trivial.

CSV files come in many forms. We need to map columns in the file to our data type. And have the user pick and choose. It’s a project. But one we hope to get to in a not too distant future.

When a salesperson tells me, “I know this month is in the toilet, but I’m gonna close $20k in new biz next month,” I need to be able to assess the actual strength of his or her pipeline. Historically, I have done this by looking at the number of deals they have at each status level, the forecasted dollar amount for each, and the anticipated close date. Without having to review every deal, I can apply a little math to that information, and end up with an accurate forecast for next month’s sales.

This exercise, while some details may differ industry to industry and company to company, is pretty standard fare for sales operations.

Existing Tags for Deal Status + Export + Date Field + Dollar Amount Field = Happy Sales Manager

Seems like a combination of Cases with dollar amount of opportunity and expected close date entered in the (hopefully forthcoming) custom contact fields, plus API for outside reporting and it will be a functional substitute for a sales force automation module.

It would be much more straightforward though to have a separate SFA module with basic forecasting included.

If 37S don’t do it, could be a good business idea, to create a 3rd party SFA tool using HR’s API.

We use 1 Opportunity = 1 Case. For basic sales info we use “About this case” field – deal value and expected close date. But cannot escape Excel sheet for $$$ info :)) We can live with that for now.
p.s. Just read some sf materials, 27-pages manual for some basic stuff, no way…

So many thoughts and ideas in this thread. Thanks everybody for sharing! Keep it coming.

I think limiting the number of cases is going to be a huge detractor. I would use the “case” functionality in a similar fashion to an “opportunity” but I’m not going to pay $29 per month to get unlimited cases. It seems like there is a disconnect- at least in my mind- between the number of cases available and the number of contacts. 500 contacts for 3 cases? 150+ contacts per case seems high.

Dlepke – just my opinion – if you’re going to use HR to track your sales, than I think it’s fair to pay some 30-50$. On the other hand I don’t understand why would someone use on-line software for “solo” work – you can use various software to work “solo” – Excel, One Note, just to name few (they cost money also, off course).
HR is ideal for small teams sharing joint pipeline (then the price of 50$ looks much better, only 7-8$ per user for team of 6-7 people, and you can go up to 15 users). BTW that’s why I don’t understand why in HR one cannot see other’s tasks!? This is starting to be problem for us!

Strictly a gut feeling on my part. I guess my use case scenario was not one they based their pricing on. In my case, I’m part of a small, distributed software sales/development team. Our president is on a separate continent. Our CEO often works from home. I’m the defacto office manager/sales guy/engineer babysitter back at HQ.

Key tasks to be performed by HR:

1) Other execs login and check the progress of certain accounts so I can avoid sending out a word doc/email every week
2) We need a central repository for proposals
3) Manage details of my contacts from my Treo- if I don’t take notes right away I forget and I don’t want to duplicate work or cut and paste when I get back to the office
4) Down the road- it would be great if we could convert a case in HR to a project in Basecamp once a we close a deal.

Hence the need for an online solution.

My biggest problem wasn’t necessarily the price. We were prepared to drop ~$100 a month per user for Netsuite but their project mgmt features suck. It just seems that the ratio of contacts to cases is a bit absurd and to pay 100+% more for essential functionality doesn’t feel right.

So for now, we’ll stick with the “open the case, close the case” workaround.

D

Just re-read this as we are thinking seriously of moving away from salesforce. The two main features we will miss however are:

1. Ability to email straight from system – can overcome that with templates and drop box
2. Manging opportunities – ours are all services we provide with an allocated time and value. We filter and report by team member responsible, client, month, value, status, stage etc.

Some interesting ideas in this thread about cases and custom fields (not yet here though). No-one posted since March – how are you all doing it. Melvin – would be interested in your response as I know you have raised this issue in several posts.