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Recommendations on a suitable contact Management/CRM for an SMB

Guys,

I'd appreciate some pointers/recommendations on a suitable Contact Management / CRM products for our small business, ideally it should fit well with these requirements -

1.) Cloud based.
2.) Middleware friendly - i.e integrate (push/pull) with our back office sage accounts system.
2.) Consolidate our supplier/customer contacts, and project data from all sources, across our business.
3.) Categorise or group these entities based on a defined structure, for example pigeon hole or group them based on location, or type of market, or by the operational arm of our business they happen to deal with, so 'Logistics Suppliers' or '4WD Customers' etc
4.) Add our internal projects to the system and tie in those projects to the customers/suppliers held within, and again order and categorise these projects based on defined types, 'Four Wheeler' or 'Two Wheeler' etc.

The requirements appear to mandate more of a contact management system, rather than a full blown CRM but all recommendations are welcome.

Thanks

Mike Lazarus

If you want integration with Sage Accounts, have you looked at Sage CRM or Sage ACT! ?

You might also look a bit deeper into the requirements such as:
http://blog.glcomputing.com.au/2009/11/whats-best-crm.html

pja-scuba

ASKER

I should have added, given the back office system in use - we're currently looking at both of those, it's early days yet but my intital reaction to the ACT demo we had recently was it seemed quite slugglish and 'out of sorts', or didn't feel native to a web browser environment.

We've been told sage CRM only integrates with Line 200 and above, but were waiting for confirmation of that, we have a demo planned in the coming days too.

It seems our use of Sage in the back office may curtail our options somewhat?

Mike Lazarus

Who did the demo of ACT! via browser? It really depends on the back-end...
For more power, hosting with a remote desktop can sometimes be better than browser.

Which Sage Accounts do you have?

pja-scuba

ASKER

We running Sage 50 accounts on the back-end. The hosted demo was with Datalogics.

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Mike Lazarus

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pja-scuba

ASKER

Thanks GL, i'll check that out . The majority of us are in the UK with individuals/small offices spread throughout mainland europe and the USA.

Mike Lazarus

If you want to look at ACT!, I know people who host in the UK that might be able to give a better demo ... Datalogic is hosted in US, I think

pja-scuba

ASKER

That greytrix solution looks quite promising, i've emailed them about a demo of that.

Understandable of course, but it'd be nice to see some alternatives to Sage products too, hopefully there are other options out there that don't require extensive use of bespoke middleware.

Mike Lazarus

I would guess that, to link to Sage accts, a non-Sage solution would be more fiddly to link

At least with Sage ACT! and Sage CRM, the middleware is readilly available from people who know both ends :-)

pja-scuba

ASKER

Something along the lines of Insightly or Solve 360 would be almost perfect if our sage back office could be linked to them, there the sort of thing we're after - both of these solutions incorporate the CRM contact management aspects we're looking for (i.e one big telephone book of consolidated contacts and companies), with the project management side we need for our internal and partner/customer linked projects.

Mike Lazarus

Let me know what you think of the sage CRM like to Sage 50 if you have a look

pja-scuba

ASKER

We had a demonstration of Sage CRM with the greytrix middleware solution, after a rocky start of call disconnects and language barrier issues, the overall impression was quite good, and we felt it works quite well, i'd imagine support for it would be a different issue though.

The pricing for Sage CRM has scared us off a little bit though to be honest, so we're looking for cheaper alternatives for our 40 users.

Mike Lazarus

Did you get them to show you their link to ACT!?

pja-scuba

ASKER

Yes we saw that too, our past experiences with ACT have not been favourable to be fair - but we thought the new version was a lot better in terms of slick/responsiveness - pricing may exclude it though.

Any other suggestions?

Mike Lazarus

You might speak to some of the Sage 50 guys in the UK to see what else might link ... but the benefit of getting a Sage CRM is having a single arse to kick when they don't link right rather than two vendors pointing fingers

pja-scuba

ASKER

Yeah that's a good point. Interesting there has been no other comments from anyone else on another CRM's?

Mike Lazarus

Because sage 50 is mainly a UK product ... only those companies that have a large presence in the UK would look it at