the goose

CRM systems are behemoths.  No matter how many claim to be ’simple’ they all feature from feature creep.  The fact remains, if you are not using a CRM, you are probably only running at half your potential cash-flow if the ever-so helpful introductary video ad infusionsoft is anything to go by.  The good guys there go on to point out that on average, customers will buy from you after 7 interactions.  Most people give up after 3.  You can manage this to a certain extent using excel or google docs (as we have been for the last three years) but after a while it all get unwieldy.

To counter this I did a quick review of available products  before designing my own minimum viable CRM system (oh groan – another techy reinventing the wheel).  Here were the front runners.

• Fat Free CRM: an extremely nice ruby implementation in the mold of salesforce.  Opportunities, leads, contacts and cases are all there.  Very nice code and all open source.  This bad boy is best suited to someone with the ruby programming resources.  It can be dropped in and used stand alone but I wanted to tie in to our existing database (which can be done) but learning the comings-and-goings of the FFCRM system was a bit of a barrier for me.
• CapsuleCRM:  This used to be Javeline CRM and I do remember looking at it before but it seems to have come a long way.  Thankfully, its come a long way in simplifying things rather than adding stuff.  There are excellent integration options available including for MailChimp and Xero as well as a number of other accounting packages.  I was very tempted to go for this one.  If we ever get around to implementing Xero, we may yet.
• Google Spreadsheets:  Great because you can share them and sit there while you watch each other follow up on leads.  Bad because they are unstructured and after a week or two they look like  mine-field.  This is what we were going away from.

Right.  So here is my solution.  I was feeding my addiction to twitter and I started to wonder if there was a way to use some of the twitter meme’s to organise our notes a little better.  I also didn’t really like the way that most CRM systems seem to have separate database entries for leads vs contacts vs accounts.  I wanted something much simpler.  First up, I created a ‘contact’ object in our database and started piping in aweber sign ups into the same table as users in our database.  Not 100% efficient but it meant that we had our log in system and user management for free.

Admin users can get a pretty standard list of contacts in Piehole something similar to the below.

But we needed to be able to track who was supposed to be followed up and when.  Our sales process is pretty lightweight.  Our price points are pretty standard and generally, each customer is worth a similar amount to us – although some buy more and some buy less.  I’ve found the above CRM systems to be more aimed at a heavier sales process with varying proposal sizes etc.  Just too much configuration and training required.  So, the simplest thing we could come up with is this home screen for a customer

So opening a profile gives me their vital stats (how well their profile is performing, previous notes etc) and I’m auto-focused on a box where I can add comments.  Any comment I type in with a hash tag gets picked up and added to the listing on the left hand side.

So for – so great.  It is easily the most profitable bit of development I’ve done on Piehole for a long time.  While the spreadsheets were unwieldy and SugarCRM was too clunky, this is doing well so far.  There are some obvious problems of course.  Not least you can easily add the wrong hash tag and it does take some maintenance to make sure that this doesn’t get out of hand.  You’ve also got to be clear on what hash tags are being used for what.  We’ve started to allocate tasks by tagging in the manner of #james.  When I’m finished the task I delete the note, indicating its done.  I guess you could take this a little further and notify people when tasks were completed.  I’m not so hung up on this but it does mean I’ll have an accurate record of the number of calls made each week which is one of big KPI’s.

A simple reporting screen is next up so we can track the number of completed calls.