Organizing Business (and Personal) with CRM
Organizing business projects is a challenging task. Organizing your personal life can sometimes be even more challenging. Perhaps you’re like me and work two jobs. Don’t forget about all of the things that don’t necessarily lie in one “world” or the other. Put it all together, and your life is a hurricane! How do you keep track of everything and control what’s going on without feeling overwhelmed?
Personally, I tend to follow the Getting Things Done (GTD) approach fostered by David Allen. There are many other strategies that can be just as successful. However, if you’re a techie like myself, you may find yourself struggling to find software that best fits your personal organization scheme. I’ve been struggling with that question for a long time, and I finally found a solution. Yes, I do think that simplifying my life a bit is certainly part of the answer, but life gets busy, no matter what. For a long time, I sought a solution that could help me keep information from all parts of my life in one spot. A couple of months ago, I found my solution and it has been working wonderfully. I call it “life by CRM”.
CRM, as you may know, stands for “Customer Relationship Management”. It is one of the bigger business buzzwords these days, partially because we’ve entered the age where software to manage CRM is available and relatively inexpensive. It’s popular among sales teams and project managers for its strength in measuring customer requirements, tasks and interactions. SalesForce.com is one example of CRM software – other examples include Microsoft Dynamics and my personal and professional favorite, Highrise. Highrise is a web-based CRM manager created by 37signals.
Let’s back up to how businesses use CRM. It’s strengths are in tracking contacts, interactions and tasks, to keep it simple. Isn’t that how personal life is structured as well? When running personal errands, there’s usually something to do, something that happens and someone to do it for. Many people like to keep track of their personal errands in some sort of journal or diary. CRM is a journal that’s in electronic form and tailored to help you get things done.
Being that Highrise is my CRM tool of choice (and what I use for both business and personal), I can share my strategy for keeping my life organized. Here’s a screenshot of what my Highrise looks like (with some proprietary data conspicuously hidden):
When I log in I can see a “Journal” of recent entries, including my notes, e-mails, tasks and so on. I can also see upcoming tasks, which I can complete and assign categories to. On the top of the page, I can view my contacts, tasks, cases, deals and tags. Cases and Deals are great. They are special groupings of notes, e-mails and tasks that pertain to one particular initiative. Cases and Deals are very similar, but Deals pertain to initiatives when there is an incoming sale. You can keep track of bid information and whether or not the deal was won. Tags allow you to assign categories to various people, companies, cases, and so on. This is all set on top of a pretty powerful set of permissions, if you’re going to allow multiple users to access the system. I’m not going to go into too much detail about the product – you can access a tour on the Highrise website.
What’s important to me is that I can use this Web-based contact / case / task / sales / Rolodex manager to help me stay on top of everything that I need to do. As a part-time consultant, I am constantly trying to keep up with shifting needs, changing priorities, and multiple updates from clients and vendors on a variety of issues. Highrise is uncanny in it’s ability to help any kind of professional like myself stay on top of this and update case files easily. When I need to fulfill a request, I add a task and categorize it. When I receive new information or have an interaction with someone, I can add notes or forward e-mails. At the end of the day, Highrise is the best tool for me and helps me to stay agile.
This doesn’t just translate to my professional work, either. Highrise CRM’s organization capabilities help in my personal life, too. My fiancé and I are planning our wedding and this tool helps us keep on top of our vendors, financials, and everything that we need to do before the big day. Being able to search for a receipt or for conversations from a specific person or company works great! It is especially useful when something doesn’t go as planned and need to go back to a previous conversation to verify what was said. I’m sure many have been in a situation like that.
Although I strongly advocate Highrise, please understand that I have some specific needs and operate in a specific way. Highrise is a perfect fit for a small company with many different things going on – most of them short-term. If you are a larger organization or operate in a different manner, different software might work better for you. I’ve worked for medium-sized businesses that have used Microsoft Dynamics with great success. I’ve worked with startups who use SalesForce.com and it is a disaster, while other startups wouldn’t want to use anything else. It is all about finding a solution that meets your needs. I can certainly assist anyone looking to determine how to leverage the benefits of CRM software or just boost productivity in general.
I invite you to keep this discussion going. What sort of CRM or web-based productivity software do you use (or have used in the past)? How has it worked for you? Feel free to share success and horror stories. Perhaps I’ll even share some of my own!
Excellent post on organizing business with the help of business CRM. Thank you!
Excellent post! I enjoyed how you joined both the personal and business aspects of your content. The review of Highrise was done in a way that didn’t seem biased, although you clearly like it and use it.
Finding the “right” software for your unique business needs is hard, really hard! It takes a lot of work and thought. So much so I created about 4 months ago a company to help nonprofit organizations and general businesses do this very thing. It sounds like we may have a lot in common along these lines.
As for my experiences – they too have been with multiple systems – Sage ACT!, MS Dynamics CRM, MS Outlook 2007 Business Contact Manager, custom apps, etc. I liked each of these systems. Personally, my favorite is ACT! because it is amazingly functional for its price, strongly supported (by a viable, resourceful company with local VARs), and has seemingly endless addon options.
While helping a company research Project Management software I came across 37 Signals and reviewed Highrise and Basecamp. Unfortunately, their lack of human contact phone support – email only – and local VAR services was an issue for my client. Nonetheless, they had impressive functionality and affordable price plans. I can easily see why you like this system.
Two others I reviewed and liked were BatchBook and Huntress Pro. I didn’t dig deep with these but they were “worthy” of consideration.
Again, thanks for an excellent post. All the best to you!
I tried Highrise and overall I like it very much, but as a dentist, I oftenly have my patients coming three or four weeks in a row, and it was simply too boring to add a task every time they came. I look forward to see some feature that helps me to save time with this…
Also a visual (fast) way to see and edit all appointments I have during the week would be grrreat ;D
Thanks everyone for your great comments, especially you, Matt.
I could certainly understand why Highrise’s features wouldn’t apply to you in your case. Since a task isn’t the same as an appointment, you certainly wouldn’t be using the product as intended. I encourage you to relay your feature requests directly to 37signals, the makers of Highrise.
I also wonder if there are any other applications that could be of better use for your specific needs. For the medical profession, more robust applications are usually (but not always) recommended. Also, have you verified that Highrise meets the standards for HIPAA and other oversight or privacy requirements?
If you need any help or want to continue this conversation further, feel free to get in touch with me!
Highrise is very similar to Basecamp but I prefer highrise because the community is much bigger and help is on demand pretty much when ever you need it!
Good read. I just started trying out highrise today. Thinking it would be great to manage personal tasks as well. Really excited when I see how you can add emails. Good idea for organizing topics discussed via email.
Thanks
Terrific work! This is the type of information that should be shared around the web. Shame on the search engines for not positioning this post higher!
Pretty nice post. I just stumbled upon your blog and wanted to say that I have really enjoyed browsing your blog posts. In any case I’ll be subscribing to your feed and I hope you write again soon!
I have experience using Sugar for my dumpster rental lead generation business. Sugar is a valuable software tool, but I find using it can be a cumbersome process. To this day, I still prefer Outlook and Excel spreadsheets to manage my contacts and engagements. I am still looking for a simple CRM package.
We would be happy to assist you in finding, evaluating and implementing the best CRM solution for your needs. Perhaps we can talk further about your specific situation – our e-mail address is info@etnacom.net.