Highrise, SalesForce.com and Small Business CRM

Keeping in close contact with customers should be the top priority of any business owner and manager. In my earliest days managing customer relationships and contacts, I had a Rolodex and business card file to maintain contact information. Like most of us, I tried and failed with dozens of electronic gadgets to capture and manage customer data. Even in the early days of computers, I messed up ACT, ACCESS, DBASE 1 and 2, and a host of off the shelf programs to manage my contacts.

My companies have invested unbelievable and sometimes unbearable sums of money on software to manage customers. I've tried Oracle, PeopleSoft, and Goldmine, and OnBase at various companies. Monster.com even spent $1million on a CRM package that they ultimately never launched, and actually affected their quarterly earnings in their startup phase.

Ultimately, it took the Internet to make customer relationship management simple, efficient, and effective. Among the many CRM solutions available online to small business, two services really stand out.

For very small businesses who need a low function but highly usable tool to manage contacts and customers for the life of the company, try Highrise from 37Signals. Readers of The Business Perspective probably know how much I respect 37Signals for their simple, efficient, and effective online products for business. I use the Basecamp product daily to keep teams on task with projects and special programs.

Highrise is the web based contact manager tool that offers you the best features of a CRM that you are likely to use. With Highrise, you and your sales people can:

Add a new lead and set a follow up appointment for key contacts and accounts at the click of the mouse.

Make calls and takes notes to keep information at your fingertips.

Turn emails into tasks, and leverage how email-focused we have become to force action with your customers and sales staff.

Set reminders for appointments and follow ups.

Group information into cases and forums that reflect how your business operates.

Like the range of online solutions from 37Signals, Highrise is available in a free version, then scales very reasonably for small to medium sized teams. Highrise is a great way for a small business to enable a sales or customer service team to work with key contacts and customers and achieve increase your sales. I can't speak highly enough about this company.

If you have an established sales force and have tried and failed with other CRM products, visit SalesForce.com and get a trial. We've migrated our Enterprise sales team to this solution, and the results have been exceptional.

SalesForce.com offers all of the features of the best packaged CRM packages, integrates seamlessly with your other web services applications, and constantly improves its platform. It's also a Software as a Service plan, so the company constantly polls customers, actual users, to find out how they use the products. SalesForce.com then turns that feedback into regular updates to their software. Since you log into the solution on the web, you have no software to maintain or network to manage. As long as you can get to the Internet, you can get to your CRM solution.

SalesForce.com has some special integration opportunities. We've just launched a customer survey to more than 5000 installations. Not only can SalesForce.com handle the email and provide amazing marketing statistics about the email campaign, but it can power your survey and all aspects of those customer communications.

SalesForce.com scales to meet the evolving demands of your growing business. It integrates easily with Google Adwords, so you can manage online campaigns and get immediate feedback on how search engine marketing programs promote sales growth.

Sales Managers love the forecasting features of SalesForce.com, and reporting makes it plain for everyone to see not just which of your sales people are meeting and exceeding their goals, but makes it plain to see how they are reaching those objectives.

I will spend future editions of The Business Perspective on SalesForce.com as our teams employ more of its features, but it deserves your attention, especially as you grow to need a really robust CRM tool to help power your business growth.