Hoping the collective wisdom of the dope can help me out as I am floundering with this simple task. I need a simple CRM system that will let 2 or 3 people share contact information on sales leads. I don’t need dashboards or email management or anything fancy. Just a simple way for multiple people to access a list of businesses that have been targeted and / or contacted.
Up to this point, my wife has been using a spreadsheet, which even for one person gets unwieldy as she is over 4000 lines of contacts. Only advanced functionality I think we need is the ability to set follow up reminders. Bonus points for simple importation from Excel or CSV files.
Have been playing around with HubSpot and Smartsheets after being referred. Smartsheets doesn’t feel like it does what I want, and is over the top complicated. Hubspot looks interesting, but imported less than 30 of the 4000 contacts that I tried. Plus the free aspect guarantees no customer support. I am aware they have a premium product, but it includes way more than I need at a premium price point. Basically most everything I see online is geared towards way more complex business models. There seems to be nothing offering simple client(or lead) management.
I need simplicity, or I will be fielding calls all day long.
What do you say Dope? Any small business owners out there in love with their lead/client management system that gets the job done simpley?
This is out of my wheelhouse, but if you already have this in excel, I’m guessing it’ll easily covert to google docs. From what I’ve seen, google docs is how all the cool kids are doing group projects now. Anyone can go in and edit something and it’s, more or less, live for everyone else.
I’d assume they have a calendar that you could use to set alerts for following up on something and you can use a document for sharing notes.
It might be a little bit clunkier than you want, but it’s free.
I’ve done something like this in Google Sheets for our company. We have 2 salespeople, a few assistants, and a head office that likes to keep an eye on the sales stats and compare them to some of their other companies. In sheets everyone can edit, even from home, without any new software.
It’s not great, I’d love it to be a module of our sales program, but it works okay. With a bit of QUERY() and array formulas it takes the raw data of what leads came in/what happened to them, and builds dashboards (which you don’t need) and “To Do” lists like aging contacts that haven’t been followed up on, or contacts with ‘missing information’. So Salesman A knows that he needs to follow up on [List of old contacts] as well as currently incoming contacts or explain why to the owners.
Though if anyone points out a really good CRM software for small business, I’d love to replace my spreadsheet with a real program (so I can stop supporting it on top of my real duties, and trust that no one is playing silly-buggers with my raw data).
These days, any time I have a need for something that could be done in Excel, but could also benefit from more project specific automation or tools, but don’t have the inclination to invest in a specific software package, I make something in Smartsheet. They have about a billion templates and the ability to manage reminders, enter stuff through webforms, etc. And I see they have in the CRM library a client contact list with scheduled followups, shared task assignments and other CRM-y stuff like that.