Subscriber Discussion

Do You Use A CRM?

U
Undisclosed #1
Apr 28, 2017

I'm looking for a CRM to track all my existing customers and maybe figure out how to sell them more stuff. Right now I call one or two residential customers a day at random and say "hey, maybe you want a Ring or a Z-Wave lock for your front door or whatever" and it's going pretty good. But I want to try and do it in like a more methodical way.

My oldest who is real good at computers is telling me I should have all the customers on the computer so I can see what kinds of things customers buy, and what kind of customers buy what kind of things. So I can predict in advance what kind of thing they're more likely to buy, so I only talk about those things. He says the kind of software I need is called a CRM but he doesn't know which one I should get.

I'm almost finished putting all my customers into an Excel. The older ones are on paper still but I have my wife entering them into the Excel now, she's got two or three more boxes of contracts to go through I think. We went in order because that's how the boxes were stacked. 

I tried looking into the different ones but it's making my head spin. So what do you guys use? It should be easy to learn, I'm pretty good with computers but I'm not like some kind of scientist. 

JC
Jesse Crawford
Apr 28, 2017
OpenEye

There's a really simple pipeline management tool I like called Pipedrive.  It won't do everything you listed above, but it's simple and cheap.  

To really do what you're looking for, I think you either need to look at a canned solution that offers all the features you're looking for (which will likely involve a lot more head spinning to find) or integrate multiple systems (accounting system, inventory, shipping, ordering, etc.) into one of the bigger CRMs to do pipeline management.  

I'm sure that's not what you want to hear, but then again it's just my opinion.

(1)
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Justin Gant
Apr 29, 2017
7PiXL

I use Pipedrive also and love it, you can customize a lot of the options to suit your needs. For example I tag each new lead with how the customer found us, industry (A/V, Security, IT, etc). This way you can go back and pull reports on which lead source is generating the best leads. 

 

 

UI
Undisclosed Integrator #2
Apr 28, 2017

Couple of options I'm aware of - Microsoft has just announced Dynamics 365 (previously they had just their CRM tool hosted, but now they'll have the ERP portion as well for warehousing, accounting, etc.) which is hosted by them and can be had for a monthly subscription. This solution maybe a bit much depending on your size, but it's very scalable and has a ton of powerful features.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/pricing 

QuickBooks Online has some basic CRM features and the ability to send estimates/quotes (as well as the obvious accounting features) which is nice for a small business.

https://quickbooks.intuit.com/online/

SugarCRM is of course the open-source community's favorite as they have free community edition you can host yourself, however if you don't have the infrastructure to do it they also will host it for a fee.

https://www.sugarcrm.com/product/pricing-editions 

SalesForce is the behemoth in the CRM world, and has a number of different options. They will host everything for you so no infrastructure is required on your side. Some of the biggest companies in the world use this platform.

https://www.salesforce.com/editions-pricing/sales-cloud/

(3)
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Matthew Netardus
Apr 28, 2017
IPVMU Certified

We utilize Hubspot, and have had pretty good success with it (it also has a marketing module, so if you ever get into websites, blog posts, social media marketing, etc it has some good analytics there). With hubspot you can track who opened your emails, who looked at the attachments, etc (as well as track sales, meetings, calls)- best of all it is free for the basic version and only 50$ a month for the Sales Pro version (which can allow you to keep recordings of all your calls for future reference or training/improving them)

MR
Mohamed RABAH
Apr 30, 2017

 I am using ZOHO CRM , it is highly customizable  , has a mobile application that allow you  tracking  your calls to your customers .

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Sean Nelson
Apr 30, 2017
Nelly's Security

We use salesforce and it works great but requires a ton of customization. Its almost like building a website. I would recommend something else if you just need some simple reminder tools

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