What's a Simple Database Contact Solution?

Gwynne Young
Managing Editor, CustomerThink
Member

Posted 20-Dec-2004 01:54 PM
[Posted for Colleen Sharen]

I have a small customer with a mailing list of about 3,800 clients. She needs a very simple database contact management solution that will track a limited number of fields.

As I have reviewed ACT, Goldmine and Maximizer, it looks like all of them have way too much functionality. She needs this mainly for marketing purposes (snail mail and e-marketing/newsletters), as well as for customer service/followups.

Since we are using an online email service (constant contact), we don't need email functionality in the software.

Are there any other options that have less functionality? Her database seems to be growing at about 10% a year, so she needs something that will accommodate this growth.

Jeff Clark
Member

Posted 21-Dec-2004 12:07 PM
Hi Colleen,

Does she want any other functionality besides her contact list?? Microsoft has a Small Business Contact manager plug-in for Outlook 2003 that may work. If she needs more functionality (like opportunity tracking etc), she might try an open source solution like SugarSales. Providers like bNitro.com are starting to target small business CRM market with these open source apps at prices that are far lower than commercial versions.

If she has Outlook, you might even just try the standard contact manager. It has quite a bit of functionality built in.

O. Taupin
Member
Picture of O. Taupin

Posted 21-Dec-2004 09:58 PM
Hi Gwynnne

For the last three years I have been myself one of these small businesses (a product management consulting firm) with a few thousand contacts. I was very frustrated because I could not find the CRM solution I wanted: The ability to create online registration forms and e-surveys, to send them an autoresponse and receive an email alert when prospects signup onm my site, and have their contact information and survey responses automatically stored and organized in an online CRM. I also wanted to be able to customize my CRM with my own fields and to prepare and schedule personalized e-marketing campaigns for selected contact lists... Last but not least, I wanted to find ways to get leads online and generate sales through cross-marketing programs. Call me crazy!

I purchased Act! and did not like it too much. I looked for an unexpansive on-demand CRM and did not find anything affordable. I approached online database developpers and got really scared by their offers. I'll be happy to tell you the whole story another time, but to make the story short, I was lucky to meet a PhD guy called Wojciech Siedlecki, who was the Chief System Architect of StarBase, a company acquired by Borland. He was the award-winning designer of StarTeam and had developped CRM in the past for the pharmaceutical industry. I told him my problem and a few weeks later we created a company called DigitalBouquet, with the help of Wilson Sonsini and the Silicon Valley Bank.

The last nine months Wojciech has developped a solution that has surpassed my wildest dreams. The product is currently in beta and will be released mid January. We currently have around twenty beta testers and would be happy to have a few more. Look at the DigitalBouquet website and if you are interested, contact me by email. I'll be happy to open you a free account. I believe you will like the ease of use and the power of this onlien CRM designed fall small businesses and that will be sold through web designers and marketing consultant. It combines and simplifies the salesforce.com and Constant Contact features. I would love to have your opinion. I am not trying to sell you anything here: Once again, this is a beta version that we wil give you for free against your bugs reports, suggestion for improvements, and feedbacks.