Gregor: How do I sign up? I typed in my email to be notified, but can I sign up to test it out now?

The app works across all platforms but is styled with JQuery Mobile styles, so is easy on the eye – and doesn’t replicate an spreadsheet, which was what we were using!

Interesting to hear you said about the “goals” feature, as we’ve built the basics of that too, but won’t be releasing that straight away. I’ll drop you a mail when the alpha is available or just sign up.

Thanks,

Gregor

Thanks for the comment and the info in your App. I can’t wait to try it. Will it be for the mobile devices only or the desktop version too?

The bottom line is Highrise is not a great sales tool until they have simple reporting features. A marketing or sales manager needs to run quick reports to see where his or her main lead source is that month or year. He needs to see if the staff is close to meeting their goal for the month or year too. Pipeline Deals is the one most of my clients use now because of their “goal” section. You can quickly setup weekly, monthly and annual sales goals and track the results. I personally would love to have a quick report on cost of lead and cost of sale. I want to know what marketing works best. I have no plans personally to switch from Highrise. It is perfect for my business where I have more monthly ongoing clients and not a lot of new business. Most of my “sales” is from speaking and networking.

My clients, who have a sales staff, just can’t fully use Highrise yet. Salesforce is too expensive and clunky. They need to lower their price to slog after the small business. It is the small business people who will use these plugins and CRM as Corporate America will typically use something internally.

I checked out your site. We have a lot in common. My web designer uses your favorite tools too: EE, PHP, jQuery etc.

Good post – and still very relevant. We use HIghrise a lot after having replaced a MS alternative (yuck…) with it. There’s a number of other things that Highrise doesn’t do though that other CRM and Salesforce do do like forecasting, setting targets and pipeline management. I looked at a number of other systems with the main barriers being 1) usability (Salesforce sucks IMO…) and 2) robustness of company (37signals are very reputable).

So we built a forecasting and pipeline management tool to extend Highrise. It’s working well for us and has made the difference in sales meetings. I’m planning to turn it into an application that is available to other Highrise users, so would be interested in hearing about your experiences with forecasting, pipeline management, etc.

App is here: http://www.buildtracks.com

Thanks again anyway!

Gregor

Just seems odd that crm and accounting are so disconnected. I mean, zoho has zoho books, which look good.. so why not have the crm all in one? Now I gotta setup two accounts, invite employees into both, it’s rubish.

That is what I would do.

I think you’re right, they’re not fully baked yet. I did find this on their blog:

http://www.tallyzip.com/what-we-are-working-on/

Do you know of another all in one accounting, invoicing, task or project collaboration tool? I noticed 37 signals has a suite, but I’m not sure how well all their apps connect. Do they share contact data?

They also don’t do online accounting or invoicing like freshbooks or harvest. I guess that’s what attracted me to tallyzip.

I played around with the program a bit. I think you are right: TalleyZip seems interesting. However it lacks a lot of key features that Highrise and other CRM programs offer. I cannot find a way to import or export data. Their support center doesn’t have that info either. So have fun manual entering your contacts! Invoicing is not as good as Freshbooks. I read a review that someone switched from Freshbooks and never looked back. Really? Freshbooks is the best!

I’ll keep an eye on this product but it is nowhere near being a great program. Nice features? Well, I’d say nice basic features. Also I’d be careful as this is in beta so I’m not sure how secure your data is especially if this is claiming to be an accounting program too. It didn’t seem secure to me when p,aging around with it.