Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Hello all! 

I am hoping to get some good ideas from the startupnation.com community about the type of contact management software people use. 

To give you a little background, the company I work for currently uses ACT! as their contact management software.  This is done through a network so individuals can have the program on their computer and it automatically synchronizes with the server.

We would like to have this same capability and we are exploring doing this through an online service.  My sister, who is a recruiter, uses www.bigbiller.com, but this mainly caters to recruiters. 

So my question is: Does anyone use an online contact management software and what do you think of it? 

Is it easy to use?

Are there any downfalls to it?

Is it worth the money?

Are their any security risks with using it?

Anything else I should know before I purchase something?

Thank you in advance for any feedback you can give me. 

Mary

To clarify:  After re-reading my post, I want to point out I`m talking about CONTACT...not CONTENT...

We need a software that tracks who talks to who and what each person talks to them about.

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Jeff Foster
1-952-935-4192

Internet Marketing Consulting - WebBizIdeas.com

That looks like an interesting product.  It seems like they have many different applications to offer. 

Depending on the size of your business you should look into HighriseHQ.com for contact management. I have personally used it and found it extremely easy to use and was cost effective as well. 

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My experiences as a serial entrepreneur profiled at http://www.usmansheikh.com

Follow me on twitter:http://www.twitter.com/usmansheikh

In the interest of full disclosure, I am a co-founder of AppShore Inc. who provide an online contact management and customer relationship management (CRM) solution. We have been in business for 5 years now and we are most often compared to salesforce.com because they are the market leader and dominate the online advertising spend in the CRM market. Our customers are almost exclusively small business people. Although we have customers with hundreds of users, our average customer has between 1 and 20 employees and on average will subscribe 6 to 10 users to our system.

The consistent feedback we get from our customers is that compared to salesforce.com our product is simple, straightforward and intutive. Although we offer free training, most of our customers do not take us up on it because the system is so easy to learn and use. We also win business based on our superior service and support. We understand that most small business people are not technicians. So we built our system with ease-of-use as the key consideration. We go out of our way to be sure our customers are up and running as quickly as possible, usually on day 1.

We believe we offer the best price available for any product of our kind. Starting at only $11 per user month and ranging up to $24 per user month for our fully customizable Premium Edition, we provide the core functionality most small business people need at a fraction of the cost of salesforce.com (which starts at $65 per user per month with comparable functionality to what we offer).

We don`t have all the bells and whistles of salesforce.com, but we never intended to. If you want a simple product at a great price that does what you need with an excellent customer service staff to back you up, then AppShore is definitely worth a look.

Salesforce.com is a public traded $400 million dollar company with a large and expensive sales force. They are looking for $1 million plus sized deals. That is why they have every feature and function under the sun and a user guide that is 17,000 pages long. They really don`t care about small business. It is not profitable enough for them to provide superior service to a one-person-show when they could be spending time with a Fortune 500 company instead.

But, don`t take my word for it, heck out our testimonials, our small business customers rave about us.

http://www.appshore.com

Hi there,

Here's a resource that may help you to get an idea about different types of CRM and opinions on them, etc. Click the link and it will lead you to the blog that contains the white paper download --> CRM Software Survey on Usage and Experience.

Enjoy!

I've got to say that Salesforce.com is really, really good and VERY flexible if you choose to leverage the environment for other simple apps.  They also have become the big dog in this space, so they're building a certain amount of momentum, and of course have more resources to work with. 

 

I just asked a similar question! 

This was my post:

http://www.startupnation.com/business-forum/#topic/Best-CRM-software-for-my-business-

 

Jeff and alabern, could you tell me, are the CRM software that each of you use good for automating the sales process the way I described in my thread? Is that how you use it? 

 

Kregg, what about AppShore? Is it a good product for my needs? 

 

usmansheikh, Cost effectiveness is very important to me, but so is automating my process so that none of my leads or potential customers or current customers slip through the cracks. Is HighriseHQ.com a good product for that? 

 

NSKincIT, Thank you for the link. I have downloaded it. It was useful knowing that such a high percentage of CRM users are dissatisfied with their CRM, and that nearly 50% have switched in the previous year. That makes it clear that choosing the right one is even more important. I wish that it specified which product the most customers liked the most and which ones they didn't, or if the dissatisfaction rate was similar regardless which CRM they were using. Of course, the usefulness of any system probably differs depending on what kind of business a company is in. 

 

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