37Signals has added an online contact manager to their online productivity suite. The new product, Highrise, to keep track of all the contacts you’ve inevitably made while drumming up clients for your Basecamp projects. The customer resource management (CRM) space is packed with a lot of big players, Salesforce and NetSuite being two of the largest.
37Signals is taking a more streamlined approach from the big guys, opting for a laser focus on only online contact management, serving as a good companion to Outlook. Contacts can be added manually or imported from Basecamp and vCards. Each of the contacts you add to Highrise gets a bio complete with photo and can be assigned task to-do lists and labeled with notes (including images and files). Each of these contacts can be locked down through user permissions, and dropped into project groups that keep your contacts, notes and files all together. If logging on is too much, you can also CC email notes to Highrise, which it will attach to the right contact.
Their basic business accounts start at $24/month for 6 users and 5,000 contacts, and work their way up to $149/month for unlimited users and 50,000 contacts.
Zoho has a similar CRM application that’s free with all features for 3 users and $12/month for each additional user. However, Zoho CRM is better suited for the sales pipeline, tracking leads from potentials to completed sales and forecasts. Zoho CRM also integrates with your web forms so leads can go right from your site to the form your database, and back out again as a .csv export.
