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What kind of CRM system would work best and how much would it cost?

  • My small financial services firm needs to keep track of our customers and how much progress we have made selling them different investments. We have a pool of about 3,000 potential customers. At any one time we are trying to sell one of five products. (Between product introduction and a sales close is 3 to 6 months.) There are 6 people doing the selling at any one time. I would like to see a report that shows progress. For example Sales Person Dave mailed out a brochure to Customer XYZ for our Deal 123 as step 1, received an answer as step 2, etc. etc. (maybe 7 steps at most.) What is a good off-the-shelf CRM package to do this? How much would you guess it would cost to hire a freelancer to customize it so it does exactly what we like? How much do you guess it would cost to run a month (assume 10 people at most)?

  • Answer:

    http://www.salesforce.com//crm/editions-pricing.jsp is Salesforce.com's pricing structure. I have used it before and recommend it. Before it existed, my company went through three painful and expensive bespoke builds of a CRM system. By most comparisons Salesforce is simple and easy to use. It's in the cloud, and may not need as customisation as you think if you don't have very bespoke processes to map onto it. You can see the cost of Freelancers on places like https://www.elance.com/sf/search/contractors/q-salesforce/. There is a large corpus of qualified developers, which is another bonus.

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Microsoft Dynamics CRM (cloud version) runs about $45/month/user and has a 30-day free trial. It is possible to customize in the sense of writing your own code, but a good CRM system should be configurable to a fairly high degree of flexibility. (Your description of sales steps above would be out of the box, and you'd have the ability to configure some logic against certain kinds of steps, without needing a developer.) If you're using Outlook and Exchange (or Office 365 mail), there's a high degree of collaboration between the two.

Lyn Never

I use salesforce.com for my company. Though it is not a financial services firm, I have found it to be very easy to use, with great customer service, extensive documentation and support, etc. Perhaps you can call them and explain to them what you're looking for. Ask them how/if their service can help you. They've got a pretty good reputation as far as CRM packages are concerned.

dfriedman

SugarCRM is another well-known CRM. And Netsuite also has CRM.

Dansaman

My employer does SugarCRM hosting and customization. Ping me via MeFiMail if you want to talk further.

COD

http://www.highrisehq.com might be a good option to look at as well - you might like the deal based approach.

ssg

http://na.sage.com/sage-act is a product that might make sense for your user size.

Sculthorpe

I'm a Salesforce.com Admin, and I picked it up cold, without any training. It's very easy to learn and use and the reporting and dashboards are pretty great! The on-line community is good as well, and you can go there 24/7 and ask any question about anything. I also like it because there's a mobile app which is great for folks on the go. You can use it for Service, fulfilling orders, producing and distributing quotes and RFPs. It slices, it dices, it makes thousands of Julliene fries! Tons of people can use Salesforce.com, so getting someone in freelance to make it do what it do is very easy.

Ruthless Bunny

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