Help a small business with CRM-y goodness

August 29, 2006 3:20 PM

Small Business Filter: I'm looking for an good out-of-the-box CRM solution for a small business.

We're a very small company (3 people) and we're looking for a simple, cheap and easy to deploy CRM solution that would be appropriate for us. We'd like this system to do only the very basic CRM type of activities:

Track and log points of contact and activities
Integrate sales data
Simple reporting and slice and dice type of analytics
Marketing list generation

We have not a single programmer between the three of us, so ease of implementation is going to be a big deal. We're definitely not looking for a Siebel-type system. Bonus points for being cheap and having some kind of tech support.

posted by discokitty to technology (4 comments total)

Salesforce.com? Pretty much everything you're asking for.
posted by GuyZero at 3:22 PM on August 29, 2006

You may want to wait for Sunrise from 37Signals. They make awesome software on the cheap.
posted by Chuck Cheeze at 3:48 PM on August 29, 2006

SugarCRM fit the bill nicely for my girlfriend's father.
posted by hatsix at 5:00 PM on August 29, 2006

I've used big iron CRM, and helped bootstrap a CRM solution up from from auto-parts tracking software (please, don't ask) and I can tell you this - the most important feature of CRM software is supportability.

Closed source or open source, what you pay someone to make your CRM software work will be far more than what you pay to its authors.

Even if your products and customers don't change a bit over the next 5 years, I promise you, what you want from your CRM software will change.

Check your local tech times, or craigslist, or whatever - the more software-specific CRM jobs people are looking for (as in looking to take), the better off you will be.
posted by Jos Bleau at 8:20 PM on August 29, 2006