{"id":7963,"date":"2009-04-18T13:43:04","date_gmt":"2009-04-18T20:43:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/?p=7963"},"modified":"2009-04-18T13:43:04","modified_gmt":"2009-04-18T20:43:04","slug":"finally-a-heap-of-daylite-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel-finding-a-crm-that-doesnt-blow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/7963\/finally-a-heap-of-daylite-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel-finding-a-crm-that-doesnt-blow\/","title":{"rendered":"Finally: A Heap of Daylite at the end of the tunnel (Finding a CRM that doesn&#8217;t blow)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Let me be honest.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve been using Google Docs as my CRM for a while.\u00a0 It&#8217;s been fast&#8211;I&#8217;ve got it mapped to a hotkey, and also on my Mac&#8217;s dashboard.\u00a0 I can collect info on clients, contacts fast.\u00a0 And I can highlight the ones I follow up with, owe something to, whatever.\u00a0 It&#8217;s not perfect&#8211;I was trying so hard to love <a href=\"http:\/\/crmondemand.biz\">HEAP<\/a>.\u00a0 Heap has an utterly perfect ethos in what a CRM should be, but it&#8217;s not ready yet.\u00a0 It&#8217;s tantalizingly close, but seriously, it&#8217;s not ready as a point of fact.<\/p>\n<p>Your mileage may vary, but my CRM requirements are as follows:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Hotkey accessible<\/strong>.\u00a0 Taking the time to interrupt your thought, mouse over, click a menu, work the mouse over the word you want is a clumbsy solution.\u00a0 I want to create contacts, appointments, tasks, documents and emails with a keystroke.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Activity Series Oriented:<\/strong> If I build blogs, there are the same tasks that have to get done with each little project.\u00a0 Install Theme, tweak CSS, whatever.\u00a0 I\u00a0 don&#8217;t want to have to remember all of &#8217;em for the different things we do over and over again.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Desktop Speeds: <\/strong>My data.\u00a0 I own it.\u00a0 I need it fast.\u00a0 I don&#8217;t wanna wait for a web query when I&#8217;m at my desk.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Email that works, auto drip marketing. <\/strong>I want to assign criteria based drip marketing campaigns and have it get handled.\u00a0 (A second feature would\u00a0 be compliant opt outs, but I don&#8217;t care that much)<\/li>\n<li><strong>Documents of some type\/mail merges:<\/strong> I don&#8217;t wanna work around the software.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Custom fields and custom views: <\/strong>I wanna put what I want in the damn thing, and I wanna see it how I wanna see it.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Custom Lookups: <\/strong>I want to look up by WHATEVER i want to look it up by.\u00a0 Nothing in the twitter field?\u00a0 Whatever.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Heap does much of this, but the interface is aggressively bad.\u00a0\u00a0 User\/Contact\/People\/Leads.\u00a0 All that stuff makes no sense, and the tagging feature is stupid and bolted on, and it&#8217;s not good enough to be a &#8216;daily driver.&#8217;<\/p>\n<p>The best CRM I&#8217;ve ever used was ACT! 6.0.\u00a0 Alas, ACT! was bought from Symantec by BEST software, and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/7963\/finally-a-heap-of-daylite-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel-finding-a-crm-that-doesnt-blow\/#more-7963\" class=\"more-link\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Let me be honest.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve been using Google Docs as my CRM for a while.\u00a0 It&#8217;s been fast&#8211;I&#8217;ve got it mapped to a hotkey, and also on my Mac&#8217;s dashboard.\u00a0 I can collect info on clients, contacts fast.\u00a0 And I can highlight the ones I follow up with, owe something to, whatever.\u00a0 It&#8217;s not perfect&#8211;I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[325,19],"tags":[328,329,331,326,327,333,332,330],"class_list":{"0":"post-7963","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"category-crm","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-act","9":"tag-act-60","10":"tag-best-software","11":"tag-heap","12":"tag-highrise","13":"tag-mac","14":"tag-microsoft","15":"tag-symntec","17":"no-featured-image"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11376,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/11376\/cforms-heap-aweber-finally-the-perfect-real-estate-crm-smashup\/","url_meta":{"origin":7963,"position":0},"title":"CFORMS->Heap + Aweber = Finally, The Perfect Real Estate CRM Smashup?","author":"Ryan Hartman","date":"February 23, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Heap CRM's recent announcement that you can now fire off Event templates from an email got me jizzing a little. Here's why: I've played a lot with the CForms wordpress plugin and knew that it allowed for 2 interesting things to happen after a form submission. 1. Cforms will show\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;CRM&quot;","block_context":{"text":"CRM","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/crm\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/02\/Picture-298.png?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":6841,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/6841\/thirty-three-touches-from-the-cloud-seriously-seeking-crm\/","url_meta":{"origin":7963,"position":1},"title":"Thirty-three touches from the cloud: Seriously seeking CRM","author":"Greg Swann","date":"February 7, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"We need a CRM solution, and it's making me crazy that we don't have one. We wrestled with REST for a couple of years, but we never got it cranking on all cylinders, and it lacks features I don't want to live without. Chris Johnson raves about Heap, but I'm\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Group Therapy&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Group Therapy","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/group-therapy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6923,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/6923\/piling-onto-heap-ill-trade-you-a-big-bunch-of-crm-development-ideas-for-an-affiliate-link-click-through\/","url_meta":{"origin":7963,"position":2},"title":"Piling onto Heap: I&#8217;ll trade you a big bunch of CRM development ideas for an affiliate link click-through","author":"Greg Swann","date":"February 16, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"If your contact information is on any of the BloodhoundBlog Unchained interest lists, I spammed you last week with a form email that pitched the then-upcoming Seattle Unchained preview as well as the still-upcoming BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix event. The form letter was sent out as bulk email from the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Flourishing&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Flourishing","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/flourishing\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8071,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/8071\/greg-swanns-bloodhoundblog-unchained-homework\/","url_meta":{"origin":7963,"position":3},"title":"Greg Swann&#8217;s BloodhoundBlog Unchained homework","author":"Greg Swann","date":"April 25, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Okay, here's are homework assignments for BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix. First, until this week I had no idea how deprived folks in the Windows world are. Just about everything I do is built around the idea of truly robust FTP software, and it turns out that this does not even\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Flourishing&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Flourishing","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/flourishing\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11777,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/11777\/the-threshold-of-accountability-is-accounting-for-things-is-this-finally-the-crm-ill-use\/","url_meta":{"origin":7963,"position":4},"title":"The threshold of accountability is accounting for things: Is this, finally, the CRM I&#8217;ll use?","author":"Greg Swann","date":"April 18, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"The iPhone screen shot is from a piece of software I've been playing with since Thursday. We got the gross idea from Redfin's agent-monitoring software. Their stuff is simpler and prettier, but ours is robust and mission-critical. What is it? Basically an automated tickler, the relationship-management part of Customer Relationship\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Real Estate&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Real Estate","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/real-estate\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10034,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/10034\/digital-access-pass-a-membership-sitecrm\/","url_meta":{"origin":7963,"position":5},"title":"Digital Access Pass: A Membership Site\/CRM","author":"Chris Johnson","date":"October 12, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"I have--as a lot of people know--been searching high and low for a workable CRM for my business. I miss desperately the easy fun that was ACT 6.0, and hated every version after that. I tried Highrise, but it lacked \"activity serieses\" at the time, schedule once, do often.\u00a0\u00a0 I\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;CRM&quot;","block_context":{"text":"CRM","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/crm\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7963"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7963\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7964,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7963\/revisions\/7964"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}