Organize Your Contacts AND Save Money with Highrise CRM

It’s hard to be efficient in marketing without the help of a CRM (customer relationship management application) to keep your interactions with prospects and customers organized. And efficiency is key in a bad economy. But which one should you use?

When it comes to CRMs, we’ve tried everything from a home-grown application to ACT, Salesforce, Sugar, Zoho, Sage and I don’t even remember what else. We finally landed on Highrise CRM from 37 Signals.

Why? Because it’s simple - simple to understand; simple to get started with; simple to continue using.

Don’t have an effective CRM?

One of the great stumbling blocks that keeps small business owners and marketers from updating, changing or just starting to use a CRM is the time is takes to do it. I understand this.

A year or so ago at Tatum Marketing we decided there was no good reason to keep supporting our custom in-house CRM and we set out to find a new one. It was easy enough to make up a list of requirements and have a web researcher compile the names of applications that fit the bill. But when it came to trying them out to decide which one we liked best, I just didn’t have the time. The learning curve was too long. I drove everybody crazy postponing my input.

In a moment of profound clarity my business partner, Andy, noted that none of the products would get any easier to use after we made our decision. His suggestion - let’s try a stripped down version; one that’s so simple to use we’ll actually use it.

Enter Highrise.

Does Highrise do everything I want it to do? No. I can’t easily pull lists for mailings. It doesn’t interface with iContact (or any email program that I know of) so we don’t always have a completely complete view of every communication with a contact. I can’t schedule an appointment in Outlook directly from Highrise. I’m still a little unclear on using tags as categories.

But we use it. Here’s how Highrise explains all the things you can do:

• Review a colleague’s notes before calling her contact at the printer
• See all the follow-ups scheduled for this week
• Set a reminder to write your client a thank-you note next Friday
• Keep all important emails from a customer together on one page
• Schedule a follow-up sales call with a lead in 30 days
• Review all communications with your investors
• Build a list of all the designers your company has hired in the past
• Enter notes from a call with a potential client
• Enter contact info for people you met at the conference this week
• Generate a list of contractors you worked with last year
• See all the people your company knows at The New York Times

And with the introduction yesterday of the Deals tracking capability now we can look at pending, closed, won and lost deals. we can keep track of deals by person or company. we can see what we’ve secured - and what we’ve lost.

Add that to all the things Highrise already did and I’m happy.

And this may be the best part: you can get up to 6 users for $24 a month. That’s efficiency and potential cost savings. You can try it 30 days for free: Highrise CRM.