Crm Rantings or Blessings?

2018 Update... Finally bit the bullet and now my business revolves around My Crm and Evernote  in addition to Gsuite Skype also for click to dial  with Data coming to Contactually......... may be the ultimate marriage

Edit to Below starting this month Oct 2016 I did find a Crm I like!

OnePageCrm and moved to Google Apps ( G Suite)

so quite a change!

Just finished up a 2 week exploration of Crm's .

My Background I use Outlook with office 365 exchange which syncs my phones and computers together.

All the tech guys say you have to have a crm to manage your contacts better and also you have to be online and ditch desktop outlook.

Following their advice i dived into and tried  Revolve, Base, Prosperworks, Insightly, One page Crm, Full Contact, Agile, Contactually and more I can't even remember.

Also this would mean essentially switching to gmail and google apps.

My goal to be more organized and efficient but keep things easy!

Currently Outlook allows me to

1. create tasks

2. create follow ups

3. create calender events

4. take and format any way I like notes about my contacts with time stamps

5. email merge unlimited contacts

6. search all notes or email for past conversations etc

What it does not really do well is have apps for it.

So After I set up Google Apps and Gmail was time to test the Crm's out!

What I found was that I would have the Crm open in Chrome as well as gmail in another window plus contacts and or calendar as well. Gmail is really cool for searching and apps but is not as fast as Outlook or as stable as sometime  Chrome will want to crash and you have to reset it. Also the Crms could not really do much more than Outlook in the contact management portion,  they could attach all emails and add in files and other things which at first I thought would be great. But then I realized that if you add these contacts with all your property pictures, and pdf etc they bog down or just dont show  them off well. Plus many do not offer email merge or are pretty expensive at 49.00 or more for many with descent features a month.

Outcome 

for now I am going to stay with Outlook, really one of the best things about gmail that I want is the free app Folio which creates timelines for your deals that you can share with your clients.

Adding Evernote to Outlook lets me have everything about a contact or property in one spot and is shareable and linkable, dropbox finishes off the package

comments from more non Crm folks will be great as well on how you manage your business