Something he left out was CRM, and I would love some suggestions.
My marketing involves contacting individuals at various companies. I need to capture all the information I know about them, track email conversations, and record meeting minutes. I also need to keep lots of comments about the strategy for each customer.
So far, I don't know of any easy way to access this data in one place without lots of steps and clicks. I've been using the file system; one directory per company, and one text file per person. I paste emails and type meeting minutes into each file.
I dream of a simple time-line based view of all the interactions with a given customer. Inside that dream, I also dream of Gmail and Skype integration.
Suggestions, please?
ZohoCRM is free for a single user, and you can upgrade later. It's not pretty but it works quite well for me. For Skype 'integration', I use the Skype Firefox plugin so I can click phone numbers to call people. It's not really 'integration' since you still need to manually enter a 'phone call' for your contact but you can do that while the phone is ringing, it works well for me.
I haven't found any other (free) CRM systems that worked for me. I tried vTiger installed locally but it's not very stable nor moving fast - not something I'd want to base business on.
My marketing involves contacting individuals at various companies. I need to capture all the information I know about them, track email conversations, and record meeting minutes. I also need to keep lots of comments about the strategy for each customer.
So far, I don't know of any easy way to access this data in one place without lots of steps and clicks. I've been using the file system; one directory per company, and one text file per person. I paste emails and type meeting minutes into each file.
I dream of a simple time-line based view of all the interactions with a given customer. Inside that dream, I also dream of Gmail and Skype integration. Suggestions, please?