A dad's advice to himself and his kids.

I’ve been questing for a while for CRMs.  I wanted something that was dead simple, that wasn’t gonna get in my way, and was going to be powerful enough that I could use.  A really important feature for me was “workflow rules,” or as Act called them “Activity Series”  I basically wanted to “set and forget” a lot of the iterated tasks that I do.

An example is that every loan needs a certain level of care and communication.  Every loan that I do needs to have an FAQ/Expectations Letter, needs disclosures, needs a title & appraisal order, etc.  Having a CRM like Highrise CRM that wasn’t set up to do that–and would require a litany of todos was out of the question.

Zoho CRM was cumbersome to use.  It probably has all of the features I would want–and it was a close second.  But the interface was clunky.  It wasn’t exciting to use.  It didn’t say, “wow, there is some thought into simplicity and elegances and not-flooding me.”   It took a lot of clicks to get to the tabs you wanted, and that was a bummer.

Zoho does get points though for support–they support the free version with both feet–they found my blog, and sent me some communications about which features were coming, so that was quality.  I just couldn’t quite get past the clunky interface that didn’t have the ability to generate sales letters.

ACT has been my standby, but it seriously peaked with ACT 6.  Those fools then went to a different code structure, and broke the simplicity and speed.  Those fools never had email right, and their email client was horrific from the get go–but they had enough going right (an example was being contact-centric, and being able to add a new contact with the <INS> key.  Sharing was a chore, and it was sort of in Al Reis’s mushy middle.  Not powerful enough to be powerful, not simple enough to be simple.

Salesforce & SugarCRM I tried, and if I had a 12-15 person team, I’d really think about scaling the learning curve.  Neither of these had any kind of usability, and unfortunately both implementations were slow.  Like Top Producer Circa 2003 Slow.  Click and wait.  And that’s OK for mouse users, but I have to tab through stuff, and click tab wait…nah, notworking.

I also gave FreeCrm a try.  That was an ugly interface with too many kludges.  If you are really really into the CRM concept, and willing to accept stupid, ugly software, I guess it has some powerful features, but having AdSense in my daily workplace is not a good solution–and the features that it takes out

The folks at Simple Sales Tracking dropped me a note, and I didn’t see any compelling reason to use their program…because I found Heap.

Etelos was probably the worst, and stupidest CRM I’ve ever used.  Both feature poor and hard to use.  If that catches on and gets traction, man oh, man.  What a cumbersome heap of garbage that software was.  The promise of working with Google docs is great, but it does nothing that it says it dos, and I really think that they could be sued for fraud.  Arrogant stupid limited software that requires 11 clicks to do something else.  This is–undoubtedly–the worst piece of software I’ve used in any field, and that includes Outlook 97.

Heap CRM:  Good, Promising, Cool, and Fun

A CRM didn’t have to be ‘fun to use,’ in order to get me to use it.  But Heap is.  I was up and creating contacts and sharing todos in about 3 minutes.

That’s the bar that you work out of–and “Leads|Opportunies|Customers have good definitions.

You can email Heap whatever you want to email it–new contacts, etc.  The documentation is here  http://heap.wbpsystems.com/forward.php, and it’s very, very cool what it will do for you as simple as emailing.

Instead of a roundup–i’ll give heap it’s own review; it’s dead simple, takes three minutes to learn, and has the perfect balance between ease of use and power.  I absolutely, positively love this software.