Let me be honest. I’ve been using Google Docs as my CRM for a while. It’s been fast–I’ve got it mapped to a hotkey, and also on my Mac’s dashboard. I can collect info on clients, contacts fast. And I can highlight the ones I follow up with, owe something to, whatever. It’s not perfect–I was trying so hard to love HEAP. Heap has an utterly perfect ethos in what a CRM should be, but it’s not ready yet. It’s tantalizingly close, but seriously, it’s not ready as a point of fact.
Your mileage may vary, but my CRM requirements are as follows:
- Hotkey accessible. Taking the time to interrupt your thought, mouse over, click a menu, work the mouse over the word you want is a clumbsy solution. I want to create contacts, appointments, tasks, documents and emails with a keystroke.
- Activity Series Oriented: If I build blogs, there are the same tasks that have to get done with each little project. Install Theme, tweak CSS, whatever. I don’t want to have to remember all of ’em for the different things we do over and over again.
- Desktop Speeds: My data. I own it. I need it fast. I don’t wanna wait for a web query when I’m at my desk.
- Email that works, auto drip marketing. I want to assign criteria based drip marketing campaigns and have it get handled. (A second feature would be compliant opt outs, but I don’t care that much)
- Documents of some type/mail merges: I don’t wanna work around the software.
- Custom fields and custom views: I wanna put what I want in the damn thing, and I wanna see it how I wanna see it.
- Custom Lookups: I want to look up by WHATEVER i want to look it up by. Nothing in the twitter field? Whatever.
Heap does much of this, but the interface is aggressively bad. User/Contact/People/Leads. All that stuff makes no sense, and the tagging feature is stupid and bolted on, and it’s not good enough to be a ‘daily driver.’
The best CRM I’ve ever used was ACT! 6.0. Alas, ACT! was bought from Symantec by BEST software, and Read more