I helped write an in-house CRM for my current employer as a transition away from Dynamics. It does leads, ownership, billing, conversion, all that stuff and it's built as a part of our existing backend systems, which is great for providing extra customer detail and insight you wouldn't get otherwise.<p>It might become a maintenance hassle five or ten years down the track, or after most of the original developers move on, but for now it was simple to write, the best solution to our problems, perfectly customisable to our precise needs and everyone enjoys using it.<p>I used plain excel to maintain a "CRM" of about 200 entries for a university society. Works incredibly well, fast and easy - exactly what you would want in a startup - i suppose until you have multiple people needing to work on it, and come upon data permission and file locking issues. I know several large businesses rely disproportionately on excel in this way.
In the post it says that Wishery helps focus on relationships rather that just sales, but it seems like all it does is send Gmail contacts over to MailChimp. Isn't an automated email blast the opposite of a real relationship? Are people really sending drip email campaigns to investors? I've never raised money but I was under the impression that you're expected to have personal relationships with investors.<p>Disclaimer: I make my own CRM product, so I'm certainly biased.
Slightly off-topic, but can anyone recommend a reasonably-priced (full-fledged) CRM system run under a SaaS model that has a nice API that I can use for Web site integration and data analytics? Salesforce seems really overpriced for what you get.
What I want most is to tie this into my phone (iPhone but willing to swap if there really is not an app for that)<p>I assume this should be easy but I don't knwo how<p><i>have all my contacts sync'd to gmail (doable)
</i>have all my mails to a contact tracked (standard email functionality, plus seems to be what this post is about)
<i>have all my calls to from a contact not only kept on my phone but also exported and synched Ba k to this crm
</i> bonus points for an app that let's me add notes after a call and syncs those too<p>amazingly enough I had this on an old nokia n95 back in the day.
I'm truly puzzled by the notion that a CRM-for-prospective-investors should be more important to a business^ than a CRM-for-customers<p>^ yeah, I'm old-school and still think startups should be businesses first and foremost