Hey Lobsters,
We’ve been tracking leads in a git repo, but there must be a better way. Do any of you hav some cool scheme you use that you’d care to share? We’re interested in keeping notes on people we’ve met with, when they were last contacted, what the current status is; who is following up and about what, when we should next contact them, etc.
Thanks!
We presently use Streak, which functions as a GMail plugin. This works for us because we can use any services that offers an email-related tool (i.e. behavioral emails via Mixpanel). When a lead eventually interacts over email, they end up in Streak. Basically like having multiple mouths on our funnel that quickly converge, rather than having one big funnel with every feature we can imagine. And if something is support-related instead of a sales lead, our choice of support service (UserVoice) let’s the team just forward the email to a “tickets@” address and it ends up in UserVoice’s support system instead of in Streak’s pipelines. This approach definitely has some downsides, but works for us, for now.
As drs said, there are many, many solutions out there. Whether a particular solution is appropriate for you depends on three major factors:
Here’s a big jumbled list of tools I happen to know about:
Maybe a few more if I think longer but that’s more than enough for you to compare.
A detective! Thanks, I’ll be here all week.
Take my up vote, just take it.
On topic: a git repo is what I’d use for leads, too.
Mr. Holmes, we require your analytical services.
I work on the HubSpot CRM. It’s free!
There are so many paid solutions and players in the lead management space. The big name is Salesforce but there are others that offer less pricey alternatives available via a search for “lead management”. Many of these solutions come with some sort of template / best practices on when and how to follow up and or prioritization based on history or actions taken.
Generally speaking seek out a CRM solution. There are probably even open source ones that run, somewhat ironically, on the free Heroku tier. (Putting on my heroku hat)
I think we use Salesforce.
I use OnePageCRM after seeing one of my clients use it and recommend it. It’s not expensive, and does the job. Search could be a bit better.
Pro-tip: spreadsheets only scale to about 50 leads.
After trying a bunch of CRMs, I ended up on PipelineDeals. It’s $24/month per user (twice that if you use their “Accelerator” thingy, which I don’t). It’s pretty straightforward and has both private and public (e.g., web form directly POSTing to them) APIs. Their customer support/onboarding is really good.
Prior to pipeline deals, I had tried a few things: Highrise, SugarCRM (self-install), and SugarCRM (hosted).