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Salesforce is a darling all around.  They have exciting stuff, good user interfaces, apparently. I’ll never know.  Why?

Because in a world of transparency, glastnost, openness…their website doesn’t give you pricing details.  30 days is not long enough to try out a CRM.  It’s long enough to learn some of the features of a CRM, but not long enough to learn the actual CRM.   When you go to "Enterprise Edition," and click tell me more?

You don’t get the info.

You can’t shop.

You don’t get price info (which we work backwards from: X per month, and oh, what features does it have?" 

You get this link:

http://www.salesforce.com/products/editions-pricing/professional-edition/

And it has no informaiton about pricing.  None damn it.

Now I know it’s 4475/month.  And @ 900 a year it’s not outrageous, really.  But– I won’t do business with a company that takes pains to conceal it’s pricing.  The ethos that they have is so alien to me: Try it for30 days THEN we’ll give you the price. It’s a crack dealer’s mentality.

Yet it claims to be $12/month. 

The way that they sell indicate that they will be a most unpleasant company to deal with, and the way that they do business is against the Gitomer Ethos: people love to buy/hate to be sold.  

So screw them.

On to the hunt:

I want a SIMPLE CRM that:

–> has hot key contact insertions (like ACT!–hitting INS to insert a contact kicks ass)

–>allows me to fetch my data however I want it  and do whatever I want with it (look up contacts: created between 6/2/01 and 6/30/05…export…or append the phrase: old).

–>Has workflow rules.

–>Will kick out mail merges to word.

–> can be adapted to do ecommerce/web form entry & set it and forget it drip mail campaigns.

–>has groups.

–>works like ACT 6.0 could have. (Oh, ACT, you’ve become such a disaster).

Not all of these things are vital; i loathe using the mouse to add something because it is poor planning; i like tabbing through.

The candidates:

zoho

freecrm.com

sugarcrm

Are there more I should check out?  Am I doing something wrong? I don’t need all of my features…just some.

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