Welcome! and Online Contact Management with HighRise
Welcome to Web Technology for Entrepreneurs! The goal of this category is to bring entrepreneurs news of web applications and technology that they can start using today to help their businesses. I'll bring you the latest and greatest from the internet world, and break it down for you in terms of what you need to know and what you can do with this technology. My name is Nikole Gipps, and I am the founder of a web design and marketing firm called NHG Consulting. My goal is to help you savvy StartupNation entrepreneurs overcome the technology barrier and learn to use technology to further your business.
Enough with the introduction, and on with today's application:
HighRise from 37signals!
Why do you need an online, centralized contact manager?
Picture this: You are the typical startup, with partners in different locations and on different schedules while you are trying to launch your next big idea. A vendor calls you in California, looking for your partner in New York to get a final sign-off on a prototype. Your partner is nowhere to be found, and the vendor needs an answer in the next hour.
What do you do? This is where an online contact manager comes in handy. With HighRise, a new product from the developers at 37signals, you can log into your account, look at the case page, and realize that your partner made a note stating that the final prototype was approved that morning. A couple of clicks, a short read, and your vendor can get started making your widgets!
Need another example? Currently I have 1,556 e-mails in my company inbox. This doesn't even count towards the average of a few hundred e-mails I have in each of my 30 current client inboxes. So when a client calls and I need to find the paper trail of our last conversation … well, you can imagine it takes me a while. Having a paper trail presented to me with an easy graphical interface and categorization for all of my contact communications streamlines this process greatly.
The bottom line is this: Improving our communication efficiency gives us more time to spend on actual production, thereby increasing our income! By using an online contact manager, we can
- skip frequent e-mail updates. The current status with each client is easily viewable by the whole team.
- access our client database from anywhere, without having to sync up. There's no more wishing you had your computer with you or being disappointed because you forgot to sync your address book before leaving on a trip.
- organize our client communications. Knowing the status of each client instantly will help you look a lot more professional when you pick up the phone. It also helps to establish personal service, as clients don't like to think that you have 30 other projects going on and don't have their exact details on the top of your head.
- attach files and e-mails to the client. It saves time when you don't have to forward every e-mail to your entire team or dig through your inbox looking for an attachment.
- record every communication, with every contact, by everyone on the team. This eliminates a lot of confusion and reduces mistakes.
Getting Started
It took me less than 10 minutes to sign up for a free account, enter in 5 contacts, and invite my employee to join my account. Within a few minutes more, I was figuring out how to make cases, track conversations, and add to-do lists. What really makes this a quality web application, in my opinion, is the sheer simplicity of it. (If you have ever tried to set up something like an Act! Database, and then you try HighRise, you will know exactly what I am talking about.) HighRise offers both free accounts and paid accounts, depending on your needs. If you don't have a need for larger capacity, their free account is not just a trial - it works indefinitely!
What an Online CRM is Not
What can't HighRise do? HighRise is not an all-in-one solution. For example, you can't manage a mailing list with it or do some fancy newslettering functions. I do still have to maintain my contacts in Address Book on my Mac, because I use iBiz and iBank to track invoices and cashflow, and these things require Address Book contacts to store their information. So even if you use HighRise, you will still need to keep your contacts in your accounting program when needed. (HighRise does offer a handy vCard exporting function to make this double-entry problem easier though!)
Results
Overall, I would say that our production efficiency and my personal organizational habbits have greatly improved in the past month. We started with project collaboration in BackPack and have now moved on to contact management with HighRise. For more information about the benefits HighRise (as I just didn't have enough space to list them all), go take the tour here.
What do you use for your CRM solution, and has it helped the efficiency and response of your business?
Nikole Gipps is the principal of NHG Consulting, a web design and marketing firm. She can be reached through her StartupNation profile, her company website, or her Small Business Essentials blog.
July 11th, 2007 at 8:04 pm
1556 emails in your inbox? Read this book: http://bitliteracy.com/
July 11th, 2007 at 8:34 pm
I’ll look into Highrise. I’m trying to find just such a system that I can link into my online sales quote-to-order management system (www.RepQuotes.com). Maybe that’s something you might want to review as well. I hope this category grows as I think web-based software is a terrific bargain for startup businesses.
July 11th, 2007 at 8:43 pm
welcome, nikole, to our blogging roster. as expected, you’re providing great tips right out of the gate…
BRING IT ON!!!
rich
July 12th, 2007 at 12:20 am
mikebaron - I know, I’m horrible. I break down once a month and clean out the inbox. You should see my SuN PM box! I have to do some serious scrubbing every time it hits 99 percent full … That’s the problem with being a web person. I won’t even tell you how many e-mail addresses I have at this point! helpusell - I will check into that, thanks!
July 12th, 2007 at 10:17 am
Hi Nikole,
Great information. We have staff in several states so having an online database was a must. We actually use Salesforce.com and it works great. And if you upgrade to the full or "enterprise" version, you can manage mailing lists, etc. I’ve used Act!s online version and several others … in my opinion, Salesforce has met our needs the best.
Another company I have some experience with is eMaximation. They offer a solution customized for franchise businesses.
July 12th, 2007 at 10:35 pm
Hi Nikole,
Very valuable information. I have been researching web based CRM for about the last 6 months. Salesforce.com is very nice but a little pricy for what I need it to do and I had kind of settled on FreeCRM which has a similar free or paid version. A lot more reasonable price wise compared to Salesforce, but this is priced even more attractively. I’m going to have to give it a close look.
Thanks!
Craig
December 31st, 2007 at 1:53 am
Hi Nikole,
I’ve been trying to use HighRise for a while now, but have really not been able to get around to it, primarily because it would not allow me to send emails (Company Newsletters) out to people based on specific Tags selection.
I switched to http://www.relenta.com to address this issue, but their interface and usability is not upto the mark. Besides, Newsletters cannot be based on custom templates. Is there not something out there which can address these basic business requirements?
Anyway, now I am back to HighRise, and are making a Newsletter application in TYPO3, and hopefully will some day soon, write a script to have TYPO3 and HighRise talk to each other.
Too much effort to do simple things.
Thanks, Rahul
June 12th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
There are a few good sites that do online CRM/contact management such as Highrise. Many are free which means you don’t have to pay fees, which is great for startups (I would not, by the way, recommend Salesforce AT ALL). One good site is OctopusCity.com.. they offer a great free CRM / contact manager with lots of space, you can sync with webmails and outlook and have a smart address book, and it’s also a business network and community.
March 15th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
[...] for 4 and above and has an Outlook plug-in for $3/user month. Highrise is highly rated by StartUp Nation and appears to start at $29/user/month so I am not sure whether or not that is really price [...]