In the middle of ordering funky business cards from Moo, and visiting my first client this evening, I have been looking around at “Client Relationship Management” (CRM) solutions. I know I have a hopeless memory, so the idea would be to pump messages, tasks, and contacts into some system that could help organise them for me, and shout reminders out from time to time.
I have ended up trying Highrise from 37Signals for a month.
Highrise allows me to do the following;
Forward email leads to Highrise, which makes a new contact off the back of them, or attaches them to an existing contact.
Associate people with companies, and keep track of both of them.
Create tasks related to people, companies, myself, or cases
Create “Cases” - roughly analogous to “Jobs” - where you can associate notes, messages, companies, people and tasks to a common project (e.g. a website design contract) - giving you somewhere you can go to see all of it in one place. (killer feature)
Receive email reminders of tasks, which can also be created by emailing the system (another killer feature for me…)
Keep everything semi organised.
The only really massive downer about Highrise is the cost - $29 a month for the “Personal” plan (intended for freelancers). Even given the 2:1 exchange rate at the moment, that’s still 15 a month - is it really worth that to have the luxury of a nice workspace to keep on top of things? Is Highrise really that much better than a number of folders in an email client ?
A part of me says that Google Apps can do most of this - everything except the “Cases” - which could of course be done by SalesForce, who are integrated with Google, and cost as much as a small country to use.
Perhaps I should take another look at SugarCRM tomorrow - try to install it again. My attempt earlier today failed HARD - resulting in 500 errors from my poor web server (500 usually means borked code, permissions, or other such mayhem).
A part of me says that I should stop trying to run things myself and just pay the money to use Highrise, which is good enough, beautifully simple, and that I can get on with using rather than buggering around trying to build, configure and learn something else.
Any thoughts?