|
CRM software is vital to your success. If you are not able to manage your relationships with customers and contacts, then you have limited future growth potential. Managing those contacts can be incredibly difficult, though, particularly if you have a wide contact base.
CRM software allows you to manage all of your contacts, through whatever email program you might be using. It also helps you with lead qualification, lead generation and management, follow-up and even auto responses. As you might imagine, this requires some pretty specific software. There are numerous options on the market, all clamoring for your attention, but 37Signals Highrise might just be the best bet for your needs. Why is Highrise better than other products out there?
First, you’ll find that Highrise integrates incredibly well with any email program. This is actually one of the strongest points in favor of the program. If your CRM software does not integrate well with your email client, you can have some serious problems. Imagine trying to manage and qualify leads when you are not even certain that your software knows what it’s doing.
One of the core features of Highrise is the dropbox. This is an intelligent solution to email and contact handling that you won’t find with other software solutions on the market. In essence, this feature looks at the email, determines whom it should go to from your list and then creates a record for the contact or add the information to an existing record. This makes your contact management almost seamless and automates one of the most time-consuming aspects of CRM – keeping up with the people who email you.
Highrise also allows you to make notes about ongoing conversations with contacts, even for phone calls, enabling you to integrate everything into a single format. This takes much of the worry, stress and hassle out of the process. Imagine running your own real estate firm. You have multiple calls and emails regarding the same property, but keeping all of those records together is a real hassle, especially if you’re going the hardcopy route. With Highrise, you can collect all those emails, phone calls and notes that you’ve created under a single heading for the property, which enables you to know everything going on with the property in question at a single glance through Highrise.
Highrise also enables tagging of contacts. Why does this matter? It puts the power of keywords into your hands and enables you to tag your contacts with any keywords that you might want. This ensures that you are able to find anyone at any time, simply by typing in the corresponding keyword(s). To return to the real estate analogy, consider the number of contacts that you would generate in just a short time in the industry. Now, tracking all of those contacts and locating just the right person by their name is a daunting, almost impossible task. With keyword tracking, you can do it all in just a single search, without having to worry that you’ve forgotten the name, misspelled it or lost the information altogether.
In short, Highrise is a competent CRM software suite that offers you considerable flexibility and enormous benefits. Its strength as a CRM management and lead management tool far outweigh the very few shortcomings of the program.
Pros:
Cons:
-
Might be too simplistic for advanced users
-
Tasks feature does not have a graphical calendar view
-
Notes and created contacts do not display creation time and date
Feedback:
ParticleWave.com – “I may have found a solution that does about 99% of what I expect and need it to do, and does it elegantly and affordably.”
AppAppeal.com – “Highrise is simple and intuitive and gives better performance as compared to other comparable applications.”
CNet.com – “Highrise's interface is dead simple to use.”
|
