CRM Recommendation: SalesForce.com

I guess in one sense anything that's online is, by definition, a communications tool. But what I mean by non-communications is simply that it isn't replacing what might otherwise be done with a phone.

SalesForce - As Newfangled has grown I've had to adapt to using various different business management software systems. For example, early on I used Excel and a custom FileMaker database to manage my books, do invoicing and so forth. At one point an employee involved in our bookkeeping basically insisted on moving to QuickBooks. His urging, and the yearly pleas from my accountant to drop my goofy homemade system, won out and I moved to QuickBooks. It's hard to leave something familiar, even when it's admittedly inadequate, for something unfamiliar and much more sophisticated. Honestly, I hated the transition. It took me three times longer to create an invoice or pay a credit card bill. However, once I adapted, I not only learned the new system, but it was actually much faster than my old one. Not only that, but it forced me to learn how to handle my books in ways that the rest of the world did. I actually began to understand what my accountant meant by cash flow, balance sheets, and P&Ls (keep in mind I studied letterpress printing and wood engraving at school - not business management). It was a hard, but in the end, a good thing for me to go through.

SalesForce, like QuickBooks, challenged my internal, often wacky business processes by forcing me to fit my methods into their more standard, broadly understood methods. SalesForce is a web based CRM (customer relationship management) system. It has a ton of capabilities, and it can be customized and integrated with just about anything under the sun. But for now I just use its basic capabilities. It has become our "source of truth" for contact and account status information. We can access a complete list of every client, all their various contacts, and all the projects in progress for each client. It is also a great way of tracking our new business pipeline. This has been especially helpful to me since Mark O'Brien handles just about all of our sales, proposal writing and new business inquiries. The two of us used to have to have frequent detailed conversations about new business prospects, current maintenance projects, who needed to be billed for what and when, etc. There were so many details and so much potential for items to slip through the cracks. SalesForce allows us to enter every opportunity, its details, contacts, proposals, category, likelihood, and potential timeframe. We move each opportunity through its progression from new business lead, proposal stage, and finally - hopefully, a project win. A robust and customizable report/dashboard system shows me hour-by-hour what needs to be billed and what projects are likely to land soon. We still have conversation about status and subtle details for specific projects but we get a lot more done in much less time with our up-to-date SalesForce data in front of us.

Adapting to SalesForce did take a good chunk of time and effort. As part of the process I made changes to our internal administrative tools, and even a few changes to how I use QuickBooks. But after working it all through I have a much tighter, better organized system.   next >