Part III: What should you look for in a CRM system for your startup?

I wanted to provide some additional info on my assertion that Zoho CRM can be cheaper than Salesforce – which is important when you’re adding your entire staff to the system in order to provide not only sales and marketing support, but also technical support and account management.

Zoho has done the numbers: http://www.zoho.com/crm/zwitch.html

They use 25 users in their example. Here’s my example: If you’re adding 10 people in your startup, including some who are part-time, like bookkeepers or outside marketing folks, and only use it occasionally, you’re going to pay $7,800 per year with Salesforce.com. And that’s with no add-ins.

For larger companies, that’s a fraction of the cost of a single system administrator or CRM support person, so it could make sense. But for a true startup, that’s just silly money to spend when you could be using Zoho CRM.

Watch here for more information on integrating Zoho CRM into your business process. We’ll see how it goes.

My Top 7 Personal Productivity Tricks

I had an opportunity this weekend to talk a little about personal productivity with some friends.

As a result, I wanted to share a few of the techniques I use to keep “on task” during my day, week and month.

A little background: I like David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” methodology. I’m no expert and I probably use 50% of his techniques, but the things I do use are really helpful to me, and the more I use them, the more I get done.

Here are a few of my favorite productivity tricks:

1) I keep three different “to do” lists.

First, I keep a “Master List” on my computer in Outlook (a la GTD) which has all of my medium-to-large sized task items.

I classify these tasks by several categories: Today, This Week, This Month, This Quarter and Sometime. I move things up the category list as they mature and come due.

I wish I was better able to classify them by project. (There are techniques for Outlook and third-party add-ins that do this, but I’ve tried some and never found one worth the time.)

Second, I keep a “Do Today or Tomorrow” list or Daily List by my side, which is hand-written and evolves throughout the day.

This is closer to what most people do, which is a basic daily to-do list of items or sub-tasks that need to get done today. I try to keep this at 4 to 8 items, max. More than that won’t get done in a day anyway. Anything larger gets put into the Master List.

Third, for organizing client billable work, and larger shared projects at one of the portfolio companies, we use Axosoft OnTime, which is focused on organizing software development projects. This is great for what it does and we use it to organize all of our billable client project work, but it doesn’t fit my need for managing daily business and personal tasks.

My first two lists are my “entrepreneur lists” while my third list is my “get the work done and deliver it to the client” list. I use different tools for different purposes.

This isn’t a perfect process.  Sometimes things don’t move effectively from the Master List to the Daily List, and then I’ve got to stop and re-align priorities and sync the two lists. But just using these lists helps to keep me organized and moving and helps enormously in driving priorities and getting projects through to completion.

(more…)

Video Posted: “Business Models for Web 2.0 Startups: What works now?”

The OkcCoCo has now posted the full video of  my recent presentation to the Bootstrapper’s Beer:

“Business Models for Web 2.0 Startups: What works now?”

(Be warned: I’m at my loquacious best… This is the full 1.5 hour presentation. I’ll try to put a series of shorter excepts online in the near future for those who are looking for info on specific business models.)

Many thanks to Derrick Parkhurst, the organizer of the Bootstrapper’s Beer and co-founder of the OkcCoco, who invited me to give the talk.

About the group: “The Bootstrappers Beer is a free to attend monthly meeting for entrepreneurs in Oklahoma City. The goal of the meeting is to provide educational and networking opportunities to young entrepreneurs. Many of the attendees are passionate about bootstrapping start-up companies and… beer.”

Part II: What should you look for in a CRM system for your startup?

We have a winner.

If you recall, we went out looking for a new, hosted CRM system for one of our portfolio companies. We had a long list of requirements that are probably valid for most technology-oriented early-stage businesses. (They’re not retail or POS oriented, for example. That’s a different need.)

You can review that list here.

In our review process, we considered a variety of available systems. The undisputed king of that market right now is, of course, Salesforce.com.

And it should be king. It does everything, has a tremendous ecosystem developing around it to provide almost any integration option, sales lead database, or automation you could imagine.

Want to automatically interact with UPS from your CRM? Want to look up leads in LinkedIn? or on Intelius? Salesforce can do all of that and more through third-party services. Salesforce is amazing.

But there’s a cost. While doing our evaluation, we got advice not only from our own staff but also from outside marketing experts. And one thing pointed out to us consistently is that, while Salesfoce does it all, the dollar cost is high. Want to integrate lead management with your website? There’s a cost for that.

And it just keeps going up as you integrate more functions and third-party services. And you pay that cost every month, usually regardless of how much of these services you use.

Moreover, the power of Salesforce contributes to its complexity. Our marketing consultant took a lot of hours to answer our questions about what Salesforce could and couldn’t do, and which third-party service did it best and how much it cost. Many choices, many options, but much complexity.

Bottom line for Salesforce: This may be where we’re going, but it isn’t where we wanted to start. (more…)