Forum Discussion

FranciscoOjeda's avatar
FranciscoOjeda
Qrew Trainee
7 months ago

QuickBase as CRM

Hi,

I was asked to find information about Quickbase as a CRM, and I need some specific functionalities. I wanted to seek assistance here.

In my opinion, Quickbase is primarily designed for data management, visualization, and project management.

Regarding its CRM capabilities, the functionalities I was looking for include:

  1. Email marketing with customizable emails (I'm aware that this is possible).
  2. Integration with Aircall.
  3. Allowing leads to schedule their own calls through a calendar report (I'm not sure if this is feasible).
  4. Call recording and tracking points of contact.
  5. Sending customized surveys.
  6. Lead management.

I'm hopeful that you can help me with this information.

Thanks!



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Francisco Ojeda
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9 Replies

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  • ChayceDuncan's avatar
    ChayceDuncan
    Qrew Captain
    7 months ago

    The short answer is yes, Quickbase can certainly be used as a CRM, however Quickbase is not built like your classical CRM with the built in features tying it to your email or phone so some things will need to be bolted on/integrated if you truly go that route. 

    Of your bullet points - 

    1. This is probably feasible - you can use native notifications and set up campaigns and leverage Pipelines as needed, however this is not a marketing platform so if you're looking for metrics like click through rates, read versus unread reports this will fall short
    2. I'm not familiar with Aircall, it wouldn't be an out of the box integration but if Aircall has a public API for you to use, Quickbase can be integrated with anything
    3. You could do this with an Everyone on the Internet role set where you publicly expose a calendar/form and allow external users to add but then nothing else
    4. This gets tricky. Quickbase is not a VOIP system, and never will be. I've seen integrations with VOIP systems like Ring Central get really hairy as well. Tracking points of contact/interactions can similarly be tricky if you consider that you might want to track emails, phone calls, left voicemails etc. Users could do that manually but if you're making 30 calls a day and sending 50 emails, thats not manageable to integrate/try and track in an easy manner within Quickbase. Of your list this is probably the weakest point in functionality
    5. This one is easy - similar to (3) you can make on internet role for users to fill out - Quickbase would be great for this
    6. This is also easy - you can set up the reporting and tracking for this no issue. 

    As you evaluate - I might also suggest/consider you looking into free CRMs as well that can integrate easily with Quickbase. For example Hubspot has a lower tier where you can do contact and touchpoint tracking, but some of the reporting is pretty weak. You could marry Quickbase to it with an easy integration that pulls over the relevant info for things like your surveys and reporting, but your sales team primarily just uses Hubspot for its core CRM functionality. 



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    Chayce Duncan
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    • FranciscoOjeda's avatar
      FranciscoOjeda
      Qrew Trainee
      7 months ago

      Thank you!

      I really appreciate your answer, great information.



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      Francisco Ojeda
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      • ChayceDuncan's avatar
        ChayceDuncan
        Qrew Captain
        7 months ago

        I had some other thoughts after my post that might be worth sharing too. I'm not sure what industry you're in or how your sales process works, but the best CRMs I've seen in Quickbase are ones where you have lower activity and more complexity. High volume quick transaction processes honestly aren't a great fit for Quickbase in my opinion. The example would be if you're negotiating a complex deal, touching base 1-2 times a week and have crazy quoting I think QB would be fantastic.

        But if you've got 20 sales people sending 20-30 emails a day, making 10-20 phone calls and just constant activity - the integrations and data entry that will require from your Sales team gets untenable. One example is lets say you wanted to integrate their emails and associate any email to a prospective customer to their customer profile in QB. If you've got 20 sales people, you'll essentially need 20 different integrations into their email to do all of that - and then sort through whats not relevant for each inbox etc. You can get around that by having them CC to a shared inbox like quickbase@company.com and then just sync that email, but then users forget and it never gets tracked. Same for phone calls, if they're on the phone all day they're not going to stop - go into Quickbase - add a record saying they made that call to this contact and here's what we talked about. Their trying to sell not spend all day doing data entry. If it's too much data entry for a CRM it'll have a hard time getting adopted or you'll only get the bare minimum entry.

        Again - you can integrate all of this - but the web gets big and hairy pretty fast depending on your sales process.



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        Chayce Duncan
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