Fanminder Blog

For those of you not obsessing over Fanminder these days (and if true, why NOT, I ask?) we’ve been growing a bit weed-like these days. In fact, it’s all I can do these days to actually do WORK. So you may have noticed my tweetings, chirpings, statusings, and other typical blatherings have taken a nose dive in the last few weeks.

This is a good thing, dear reader, though you may not feel as snuggly with us as we’d all like, it does mean the business is starting to stand on some legs. Our cup is slowly running overeth.

So I’m happy to report we have passed the “let’s manage customers in excel” milestone. Many of you business owners know the pains at this point: Too much information in different places, such that it takes too much time to find it. Lost information. People on the team needing to touch different parts of the elephant…

So we need Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.

Our needs are still basic: Keeping track of our merchant clients, owner info at these companies, and the various key touches they or we do with each other. Of particular importance is creating tasks and assigning them, such as “who’s going to design and print the table tents?” or “Review the Voting Contest with Merchant XYZ.”

With high expectations for the online CRM industry and a wallet full of Freemium dollars, I ventured out on the web. I tried a couple of hot CRM tools of the day, and at least one online service from a leader in small business software. Alas, the online tools I tested had bugs, were lacking an intuitiveness I’ve come to expect, and missing important features.

Tracy (co-founder) asked me to re-review Salesforce.com’s CRM offering. I was leery since my last review when I was fooling around a few months ago. I recalled this overly complex and kind of dated tool. Well, I’m happy to report it’s mostly love at first sight. What I love most about Salesforce is that it gets the basics right: There’s an account and each account can have mutiple contacts, notes, attachments and so forth. Tasks are easy to assign and create. Inviting people is a breeze.

The default settings weren’t perfect for me but within a few moments I was able to customize the fields to suit our needs. It’s in this area – customization, that the tool really shines. While I initially wanted “simple” I wound up spending about an hour configuring the tool, such as customizing the “Lead Sources” pick list. No other CRM tool had anywhere near this ability.

And its pricing is inexpensive, just $9 a month per user, although this climbs for 3 people or more, I believe. I’m going with Salesforce’s CRM solution.