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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