What are your unfulfilled CRM wants & needs?

[Ken Wood]

Hi guys,

If you have an interest in CRM from a user perspective, I'd welcome your comments on a couple of things:

We have a new hosted CRM software platform that we're preparing for public release within the next couple of months. So far we've only delivered it to selected large clients, next I'm looking forward to getting some feedback from the Soloist community when it's ready to show.

In the meantime, do you have a key feature on your wish-list that you haven't been able to find in other products? Or perhaps just one that you haven't been able to find in a product that's affordable for your business? I'm interested in making sure our CRM is the best possible fit for the needs of this group, so hit me with it!

Existing features include: invoicing, shopping cart, MYOB integration, time tracking & billing, geo mapping, iPad support, ticketing/help desk - so I'm looking for your ideas that go beyond the basics.

Also, during our launch period we plan to offer Flying Soloists a permanently free subscription for the hosted CRM. Our current thinking is to offer the full feature set for up to 5 users, just cap the database size at 1,000 contacts.

So if you suggest a useful feature that other Soloists like too, it may end up in the released version that you'll be able to access for free in coming months!

Cheers,
Ken

[Rhys]

Ken,

Hi integration with MYOB is good, although there are a couple of other products in the market that do this already. If you are offering this as a hosted solution an integration into Xero would get me interested,

Cheers, Rhys

[Ken Wood]

Hi Rhys,

In the short term, unfortunately Xero doesn't have enough market share for us to justify the programming time required to interface to it. There is a long list of additional features we want to build ahead of that one on the to-do list.

However our CRM platform does in fact contain an entire, complete accounting system of its own. For the initial software release we are only enabling the A/R functionality for invoicing and processing of payments. The rest of the accounting system just needs thorough testing and bug fixes, so we'll enable the additional functionality in coming months when we've had a chance to polish it up a bit. Until then, MYOB is the only option.

Cheers,
Ken

[Rhys]

Hi Ken,

Thanks for the reply. I will be intrigued to see how you go in the market.

Developing an accounting solution at the same time as launching CRM must be pretty tough. I have seen lots of other applications "tag along" with MYOB (including for example YouGrow that is already out there as an established solution in the CRM space), by deploying add on solutions that complement rather than compete with MYOB.

If you are including an accounts back end you will clearly at some stage end up competing with MYOB - so as I say looking forward to how this goes in the market (not only against MYOB, but also the newer online solutions such as Saasu & Xero).

Good luck! Cheers, Rhys

[websitedesigner]

Hi Ken one thing I find very difficult to manage with Sugar (we use the community version) is the leads that come into the business. I would love to see the following in a CRM that is made for small business where time is critical.

1. A simple in-email ability to mark leads as junk (i.e. delete them) or convert them to opportunities. I find the process in Sugar community way too slow and I end up not doing it at all. Much like you can publish / trash wordpress comments by clicking on the link in the email that takes you straight to the page to confirm it (assuming your browser has saved your login details)

2. Even better to the above is an automated system to convert all leads to opportunities after x amount of days so as a small business owner you can continue to operate via email / phone without having to update the CRM for new work - the system will assume it is a legitimate opportunity if you haven't trashed it.

3. Once accounting data is brought in make it so it automatically flags anything in the leads table as potentially being out of date - one assumption it would be fairly safe to make is if they are in the leads table and they have recently come across via a MYOB sync for the first time then the lead was probably converted - so provide a list of these and the ability to change the status by bulk.

Thanks.

Dan

[Ken Wood]

Originally Posted by websitedesigner

Hi Ken one thing I find very difficult to manage with Sugar (we use the community version) is the leads that come into the business. I would love to see the following in a CRM that is made for small business where time is critical.

1. A simple in-email ability to mark leads as junk (i.e. delete them) or convert them to opportunities. I find the process in Sugar community way too slow and I end up not doing it at all. Much like you can publish / trash wordpress comments by clicking on the link in the email that takes you straight to the page to confirm it (assuming your browser has saved your login details)

OK, that seems pretty simple to implement.

Originally Posted by websitedesigner

2. Even better to the above is an automated system to convert all leads to opportunities after x amount of days so as a small business owner you can continue to operate via email / phone without having to update the CRM for new work - the system will assume it is a legitimate opportunity if you haven't trashed it.

That would also be simple to do, but sounds dangerous to me - too likely to lead to bad data in the system. Plus you normally add more info when you create an opportunity: deal size, products etc. I don't think we'll add this to the core product, but it would be easy for you to build as a user-defined rule.

By the way, we have iPhone and Android support so it should be easy enough to update the CRM with stuff like this from your phone.

Originally Posted by websitedesigner

3. Once accounting data is brought in make it so it automatically flags anything in the leads table as potentially being out of date - one assumption it would be fairly safe to make is if they are in the leads table and they have recently come across via a MYOB sync for the first time then the lead was probably converted - so provide a list of these and the ability to change the status by bulk.

Not sure I follow... I'd have thought that you'd have the lead in the CRM, quote from the CRM, track the opportunity in the CRM, then push a button and convert the quote into an invoice. At that point the invoice would sync down into MYOB. The CRM also provides a way for you to track your time and any subcontractors time and log it against the job, so you can monitor project profitability as well.

Were you thinking instead that you'd do everything in the CRM up to a point, then jump over to MYOB and invoice from there? If so, why?

Cheers,
Ken

[websitedesigner]

Hi Ken

Sorry the way we use MYOB is the other way around - i.e. we do all accounting in MYOB and then bring it into the CRM as an import just for reporting purposes - i.e. to report on revenue by lead source etc - invoices are never generated by the CRM for reasons I will explain below.

Re this process "you'd have the lead in the CRM, quote from the CRM, track the opportunity in the CRM, then push a button and convert the quote into an invoice"

To me this would be suitable for consulting businesses with decent margins that put a decent amount of time into the client acquisition process. For businesses like mine that rely on volume I can't put this kind of time into new projects. In fact we rarely provide formal quotes (just standard fixed price packages with requirements documents defining the work and the price) and when we take on a client it usually leads to a number of projects / some ongoing services like hosting / support etc and tracking all of this in the CRM is way too time consuming. Instead we use the CRM to store the leads so we know where people came from and then manage the rest of the billing via MYOB then bring the accounting data back into the CRM every quarter for reporting. My biggest problem is I don't even get time to go into the CRM and mark leads as opportunities and half of the time its not important for me to track the extra information.

I know its backwards but this is a forum for solo businesses and I really think most solo businesses would use a CRM if it was really easy and provided them with good data but for a lot of them - especially low margin / high volume businesses tracking every lead like this is not feasible.

Just my opinion - I haven't done a lot of work with CRMs but I do feel for a solo business something really simple is needed.

[Ken Wood]

A quick update to my first post in September, our new CRM is launching on Monday:

http://www.picrmsoftware.com.au

Key features include: it's fast (very fast!), easy to use and lots of stuff that requires programming work in other CRMs is user configurable through the GUI.

Relevance to Soloists: it's completely free if you have less than 500 contacts in your database.

Integration with Mailchimp will be available next week too, they have a free offer if your list is less than 1,000 contacts.

So if you're a Soloist with less than 500 contacts in your database, then hosted CRM and integrated email marketing are both completely free for you.

If you want a look at it, you can register today and you'll receive your login once we launch next week.

Cheers,
Ken

[Bullet Web Studio]

Cool. Good luck with the launch Ken.

[Ken Wood]

Originally Posted by Bullet Web Studio

Cool. Good luck with the launch Ken.

Um, yeah delayed by 7 days till the 15th. Programmers can't quite be ready in time...