Salespeople: Contact Management Software?
 

Doing a little digging around for the gold-standard CRM for Windows. I've gleaned that ACT and Goldmine seem to be the 2 big ones, but the reviews on Amazon are horrible for these products! Are they really that bad? Or, better alternatives?

I had ACT for a while, hated it and returned it (they had a 30 or 60 day money back guarantee). We use an old version of Contact Master (came with Simply Accounting 2003, now discontinued) which works fine except that it won't take a session date past 12/31/05. No big deal, we found a workaround. Cheap, only $30 or something like that. Crappy integration with SA, though.

I'll be watching this thread to see what other suggestions come up, though, as I'd like move to a more integrated system.

Software? That's so mid-'90s. Salesforce.com

salesforce.com, may be more than you need, though.

Looking at salesforce.com right now.... pricey for a very small sales effort, but you get what you pay for, I suppose.... Jon or Brad, do you use it?

If it is for real estate I know 1.

I did some research for a client on hosted systems. Here's my short list (pay particular attention to SugarCRM):

Entellium
RightNow Technologies
SalesNet
Salesforce.com
SMB Live
SugarCRM

Drop me an email and I can send the hyperlinked list back.

Don

We use salesforce.com as well...

sugarCRM is pretty good, but SalesForce is the tried and true 800 pound gorilla.

Our company uses Oracle CRM. Slow, inflexible and sucks. Could be how it was customized for us but after 2 years of training and use, we all still hate it. Can't see how it has made my job easier. It's been mainly for the bean counters, I'd say.

We're using Act 2006, but I'd give it mixed reviews:

Good: The opportunity value tracking was improved quite a bit over Act 2000.

Bad: You can no longer synchronize a remote office's database without the pricey Act 2006 Gold. Since I work out of a one-person home office, and the other 5 people are in CA, it kind of leaves me in a lurch. No reasonably priced solution in sight yet, so we've been running on two databases. Ugh!

We've been researching this and Salesforce seems to be the preferred solution at the moment.

We're using salesforce now (about a year) and its good.

In the past, we've gone thru Siebel (absolutely sucked) and various versions of Goldmine. Goldmine worked well and did everything asked of it. Of course some IT genius decided they weren't going to support it anymore, hence the parade of 'newer and better' CRM systems.

SF.com works fine, though we still don't have quite the same functionality that we did years ago with goldmine.