Relationship and lead management: how we chose a CRM system

Budeco helps companies innovate, and specialises in projects that make smart use of modern ICT and internet technologies — not as objective in itself, but as a means to develop new business and to add innovation and improvements to the way they work. But our position comes with responsibilities too. Hence we want to organise our own business as smartly, efficiently and effectively as possible. More on how we do that can be found in our blog at: Budeco, the making of (in Dutch).

Right from the start, we have taken our relationship with clients and opportunities very seriously. This is not just a matter of technology, although technology does help us to put and keep clients on our radar, to communicate effectively and to learn. In the first instance, we selected HighRise, not just because it integrated well with MailChimp, our e‑zine distribution software, but also because it wasn’t too complex and it looked state-of-the-art, thanks in part to its tight integration with Twitter (in the contact pages, for example, you get to see your client’s address and other traditional contact details, but you are also shown their latest Tweets, whether they clicked on your e-zine and, if so, which parts). So it was a sensible choice to get started quickly and effectively.

Four months later, we have started to get enough clients and leads, and the number of contacts we’ve got (around 1,100) is so serious that we decided to select a CRM system for the long term, because waiting till later would probably cause us problems later. What’s more, HighRise provides limited options for managing leads, and we wondered if this could be done any better / more in-depth.

We formulated some key criteria:

Contact management:

record all standard name and address data, but preferably also modern contact data, such as Twitter name, LinkedIn address and blog details, etc. It should be possible for people to sign up for an e‑zine or a course on our website and, after confirmation by us, for all that data to go straight into the database. It should be easy to give contacts tags, divide them into categories and preferably also to include rich information on their click behaviour in our e­‑zines, for example.

Lead management:

It should be possible to create leads and easily link them to one or preferably more than one contact. It should be possible to classify leads (according to a scale of 0% to 100% chance) and to drill down into the sales they generate. Preferably, it should also be possible to see a timeline of sales throughout the deal period. We need to be able to create Actions / To-Do’s, and link them to leads and contacts, and then integrate them with our calendars. In one way or another, we want to be able to put communications (e-mails) with clients and leads into the system. Finally, we need to be able to manage the administration of courses and course participants in an effective way that makes a positive contribution to the administration, but also to the subsequent marketing.

In general terms, the system must be ‘user-friendly’, an important yet difficult concept to quantify. In our case, this means in practice that the program must not be so unpleasant to work with that there’s a hurdle to leap every time you want to use it. That just wouldn’t work. The system should be SaaS-based (Software as a Service), and should not therefore need to run on one of our servers. Finally, price will also be a factor because, although most systems charge by the month, the total cost per year is a serious sum of money. The prices charged vary widely.

The first thing you notice when you take a serious look is the overwhelming choice. TactileCRM, Commence, SalesForce, Capsule (formerly known as Javelin), SugarCRM, HighRise and BatchBook are some of the well known applications, but there are dozens more. We took a practical approach, and after a quick scan we narrowed it down to these seven, which appeared to meet the most important of our criteria.

After we rated them for user-friendliness and price, SalesForce, Commence, SugarCRM and TactileCRM also failed to make the cut. Having said that, SalesForce in particular did seem to meet all our specific criteria and offer a whole load of additional features too. The result is a relatively expensive application (at least €108 a month for us), which offers lots of features we are not going to use. And that’s something that doesn’t help in terms of user-friendliness. It was this in particular that led us to rule SalesForce out.

We were left with Capsule, BatchBook and HighRise. We were already using HighRise, but we had our doubts about its user-friendliness. While it is intuitive to use, it does quickly become messy and therefore less accessible.

To make the comparison more rational, we took our requirements and translated these into specific features. We then examined whether the three remaining applications offered these features and, if so, how exactly. To do this, we opened some trial accounts and literally tried out everything, because we didn’t want to run the risk of finding out in a live environment that a feature is not quite as good as it appeared in the marketing blurb. This is a concern in particular for the integration with other systems, such as MailChimp. What one person thinks of as integration, someone else might call one-way import, so it doesn’t do any harm to check things like this out if they are important to you. All packages offer fully functional trial accounts, even including API integration with third-party systems. Which is excellent.

We did check the basic feature set that you would expect in any CRM (the ability to store name, address, phone number and e-mail details), but didn’t include it in the comparison. What remained were the points that we needed to test in order to understand whether or not and how they worked, and which were ultimately decisive in the choice we made. After a total of 40 hours of testing and trying, we obtained the following results:

[1] For 2 users, price per month

[2] HighRise needs a third application for this: Formspring

[3] None of the programs integrates so well that unsubscribe data is fed back into the CRM application’s central database. All three put the ultimate responsibility for this with MailChimp.

What you notice is that two of the three packages that best meet our needs are attractively priced. HighRise is remarkable for its price point close to that of SalesForce. In terms of features, though, HighRise doesn’t come close to SalesForce. And as the table shows, its quality is not substantially different than the other application. In fact, the opposite is the case in terms of user interface and user-friendliness, although this is in part a question of taste. We also don’t get the impression that HighRise is making efforts to quickly add improvements suggested by clients. HighRise is out.

E-zine unsubscribes and other statistics

When we send an e­‑zine to around 1,100 people, we need to deal properly with the people who unsubscribe. You don’t want to be sending them the next edition of the newsletter. MailChimp takes care of the technical aspects of this, and does it well as long as there is only one mailing list. If you create a new mailing list in MailChimp (e.g. because you want to mail a different subset of your contacts), MailChimp does not automatically ensure that the unsubscribers from your other newsletter don’t get your new mailing. That isn’t necessarily a problem, but it illustrates why it makes sense to at least feed the unsubscribe data into the central database. And we actually also think it’s odd that a CRM system opts as a matter of principle to distribute contact information through other applications. The same goes for your newsletter statistics. In BatchBook, information on who has clicked what stays inside MailChimp. In both cases, Capsule opts to get that information into the central system via an API. This not only affords more insight, but it is also less prone to errors.

Twitter

BatchBook and Capsule both nicely integrate your contacts’ tweets, displaying them on the contact page. What’s really neat about BatchBook is that it also takes the profile photo from Twitter and displays it on the client’s contact card. It works beautifully and saves a lot of time if you want to add photos to your contact cards.

Deals: status

BatchBook allows you to categorise your leads as either won, pending or lost. Capsule also has these basic categories, but adds the option to create other categories that suit your business. You could create ten different status types if you wanted to.

Deals: e-mail association / dropbox

It makes good sense to add important e-mail correspondence  to the account / deal information in your CRM so that everything that helps you follow up your leads efficiently is all in one place. Both systems allow you to send e-mail to the CRM. BatchBook does this by setting up a general e-mail address that you can use in the BCC field of your e-mails. Your e-mails then arrive in a central message store called the BatchBox. From there, you can move them to the right place in the system. It works, but it’s not incredibly advanced or convenient.

Capsule has a very intuitive solution. You send your e-mails to the system using the BCC field. Capsule then automatically links them to your contacts if they are already in the database. If they’re not, a new contact card is created for your new contact. The next time you log into the system, you simply have to confirm that the e-mail was recognised correctly. For new contacts, you will need to fill in the rest of the contact card. The same principle applies for e-mails you get from contacts. Just forward the messages to the CRM and Capsule will automatically link them to the right contacts.

To-do’s, actions and calendar integration

Every application supports the creation of to-do’s or actions for yourself or other registered users. These actions can be linked to contacts (e.g. someone you need to call back next week) and/or leads. The best thing is if the action can then easily be added to the application where you normally organise your to-do’s. For many people, this is the diary or calendar. BatchBook lets you save the action as an iCal item so you can save it and integrate it with your Outlook calendar, for instance. Capsule doesn’t offer this, meaning that to follow up your to-do’s, you always need to return to the CRM application to check what’s on your to-do list. That’s fine, albeit less elegant.

Conclusion

These are the key differences from our point of view. The systems differ here and there in how they work (Capsule is nice in that it offers categories, and the supertags are a great innovation by BatchBook) and neither package is actually very good at financial reporting on sales pipelines, especially if your accounting is not cash-based. So you shouldn’t use if for this, but the features available are sufficient for your lead management. We also want a manageable system. As other systems prove, you might want to integrate all sorts of things, but in the end this makes the application too complex and inaccessible – and that would make things worse rather than better.

The winner

: Capsule CRM. By a nose. A final, important consideration was that Capsule is being very actively developed, they responded to a query of ours within 30 minutes, and they clearly engage the users in the development of new releases.

Final note

This has been a time-consuming process. All  in all, it has taken at least 56 hours, and we will only be able to make a final assessment of our selection after a few months of use.

We consider it worthwhile, because high-quality, professional communication with our contacts is one of the cornerstones of our success.

At the same time, we cannot guarantee that we haven’t overlooked something. Our choices were made based on our criteria and subjective experiences. They are not intended in any shape or form as recommendations for the choices of others.

Addendum: 20 August 2010

We first published the review above about six months ago and we have received lots of comments on it. In fact, it is one of the most visited pages of the entire website. And on the English site, it’s actually the most visited page. We regularly get questions along the lines of ‘so are you still happy with Capsule several months down the line?’. During this time, certain features have also been changed or added. Because many people are still reading this review, it seemed a good idea to post a brief update to refresh the overall picture and keep it useful. We should point out here that this addendum only covers the CRM package that we chose: Capsule CRM. We make no comparison between the Capsule updates and any existing or new features of the systems discussed previously. It is perfectly possible that new features in Capsule are already available in BatchBook.

Are we still happy?

This is the most frequently asked question. The answer is yes! We had a good idea of what Capsule was good and not so good at, so we have not been disappointed.

Have we learned anything?

Yes … even more than we first thought, we have come to realise that Capsule CRM is not a project management tool. Although it is possible to create tasks as standard and it recently became possible to automatically link To Do items to your calendar, it does not lend itself to providing an overview of your project portfolio. This does not detract from the fact that the features mentioned are still useful! We use the standard tasks, for instance, to monitor all the steps needed to ensure that all participants on our courses are registered and processed correctly.

What has changed?

Frankly, some significant improvements have been made in the last six months. As already mentioned, To Dos can now be created and easily and automatically integrated into your calendar. Now that is a nice feature. What we are really delighted about is the ability to add social media information (such as LinkedIn profiles and Twitter accounts) to the contact data. Capsule automatically retrieves the profile photos, which might not be important to everyone, but we really like it. This is also another good example of how Capsule listen to their users, because this was a much requested feature. It goes to show that user requests do have a real influence on the priorities given to new developments.

Another good example of this is the recent integration with Google Apps. It was often requested by users and therefore implemented remarkably quickly. Capsule can now be accessed from within Google Apps in the same way as you access your e-mail (including single sign-on). This integration makes Capsule the principal administrator of your Google Contacts, making it much easier to share Google Apps contacts across multiple users (Google Apps cannot do this). Very nifty is the fact that if the contacts in your smartphone are Google contacts, this integration means that you have instant access to all your Capsule contacts (including auto-finish) from your phone.

A number of minor usability aspects have also been improved. In short, as we had hoped and expected, Capsule is actively developed and its makers listen to the users remarkably well. We are currently also testing Xero, which integrates seamlessly with Capsule, to manage our financial accounts.

Impartial

We have described the selection process we followed and made this update just because we could, and it was a relatively minor effort for us to share our experiences with the rest of the world. From the responses we get, there would appear to be a great deal of interest in it. We did it totally impartially and this will remain so.

If you appreciate this story, however, we would appreciate it if you would click the Facebook “Like” button. If you want to learn more about Capsule CRM, you can do so using this link. It includes a code so that we get a percentage of any sales you may subsequently generate for Capsule. That’s a great way to show your appreciation for this article if you do opt for Capsule! If you don’t want to do that, you can just use this link that doesn’t include a referral code.