[consulting] Customer Relationship Management software

[Khalid B]

I have been thinking of this too for the same reasons.

Depending on whether you are  a solo player or not, you may want
to check the free site http://sidejobtrack.com/, which is for
freelance part timers, and not for a full time multi person shop.

Another solution is BaseCamp (basecamehq.com) which has a range
of solutions, priced accordingly. Note that Ruby On Rails started as
basecamp and was then extracted by the parent company, 37 Signals.

My ideal solution (dreamware at this stage), would be a set of Drupal
modules that would start by the client creating an account. They are
then lead through a questionnaire. You get an email summary or even
just a link. The project then progresses from there, with all communication
being in one place (as comments and attachments) from that module.
Ideally, it would have built in billing and payment management (ecommerce
or  just the payment parts of it?). From that, you can get reports like how
much do I have in the funnel? How much did we make last month, ...etc.

Sounds like a be all end all thing, but Drupal can do it.

As a related topic, I have been approached by a client who likes Basecamp
and want something in Drupal that is equivalent to that. Nothing concrete yet,
and I asked  them if it would be GPL'd and they seem to not mind it that much.
If that materializes, maybe a few of us can collaborate and turn the above from
dreamware to real life.

On 4/11/06, Harry Slaughter <harry at slaughters.com> wrote:
>
> I'm starting to see that one of my toughest problems as an independent
> consultant is going to be managing client interaction.
>
> I'm already juggling more leads and gigs than I can keep track of. And
> I'm not used to handling client interaction directly. Even a crappy
> product manager can usually filter out a lot of client noise :)
>
> I've been installing and trying out various FLOSS CRM packages. The ones
> that aren't pure junk tend to be too fancy.
>
> So far, I'm leaning towards SugarCRM, though I'm having trouble with it
> straight out of the box, and I hate to spend time debugging stuff that's
> supposed to be saving me time.
>
> I'm wondering what other folks are using, if anything. If you don't use
> CRM, what do you use?
>
> --
> Harry Slaughter <-> harry at slaughters.com
> Web Developer
> http://devbee.com/
> http://slaughters.com/
> h: 619-303-5952
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