Do It Yourself!
CRM 3 years back, we had a decision to be made in the team. Should we use a CRM software like Salesforce, HighRise or get an open source one like Sugar CRM, or build one in-house. For a Bootstrapped startup "money" is this big fat guy sitting across the table, without a care, smoking cigar and blowing rings in the air - while we fight it out. He finally clears his throat and says - to hell with your arguments this is what you should do - and he leaves the room. It was decided for us - and we decided to build a simple CRM in-house. The interface is not fancy, no configuration was necessary - because this is a square peg fitting exactly into a square hole and had no unnecessary reports, and no data upload was needed. We started with simple categories - Boo, Cold, Warm, Hot, Super Hot, Win. It did not make sense - so we changed them to Boo, Uncategorized, Nurture, Qualified, Demo, Propose, Negotiate, Negotiate Critical,Collect Cheque and Win. Whenever the team says - man this