Top CRM Programs for Contractors

Update to This Post 5/2015 This post was writ­ten a cou­ple years ago. As you know, the small busi­ness CRM mar­ket changes rapid­ly. All of the CRMs men­tioned below are still in busi­ness and all have their place in this world. As of 2015, I’ve kept my eye pri­mar­i­ly on the fol­low­ing CRMs for Con­trac­tors (ones that work well with Google Apps for Work)

1. Per­son­al Favorite: Base CRM (Sim­ple & an Incred­i­ble Mobile/​Tablet Ver­sion for iPhone, Android & Win­dows) Not the cheap­est CRM, but very easy to use. Lots of great fea­tures: $25 – 75 a month per user (range)
2. Pipeline Deals: Good iPhone Ver­sion, Great inte­gra­tion with Google, Lots of con­trac­tors use this one (native app) ($24 – 48 a month). Most of my con­trac­tor clients use Pipeline
3. Sales­force: The pric­ing is more com­pet­i­tive than it used to be. It is a full force CRM…does just about every­thing. It would require a lot more train­ing and com­mit­ment from your team if you choose to use Sales­force. (Zoho CRM is an alter­na­tive to Sales­force. It is less expen­sive but does basi­cal­ly the same things)

Back to the Orig­i­nal Post I’ve been on the hunt for a num­ber of years for the ​“per­fect” Cus­tomer Rela­tion­ship Man­age­ment (CRM) pro­gram for paint­ing con­trac­tors pri­mar­i­ly and remod­el­ers. My goal was to find a pro­gram that was easy to use, afford­able, acces­si­ble any­where and mobile. A lot of pro­grams claim to have all these fea­tures, but I have still yet to find the per­fect pro­gram. Most of the CRM pro­grams I’ve test­ed out lack good mobile capa­bil­i­ty at this point, but every few months I see bet­ter upgrades. Below I will list the top pro­grams I have found for con­trac­tors and a few notes to why I like them and or what they lack. I will focus pri­mar­i­ly on ​“cloud” (online) CRMs and not as much on the desk­top ver­sions. Note: This post is for those who already have a knowl­edge of what a CRM does. If you are not famil­iar with a CRM, just con­tact me! Top CRMs for Con­trac­tors (1−10) 1. ACT! by Sage (Desk­top): ACT! is prob­a­bly the most rec­og­nized CRM for con­trac­tors on the mar­ket. It can do just about any­thing. It is a stand alone pro­gram with 3^rd par­ty inte­gra­tion for mobile phones. ACT! is ful­ly cus­tomiz­able for your busi­ness, but it can be a very expen­sive process to pur­chase the pro­gram, get it set­up, and oh yeah…learn how to use it. The pric­ing is per user with a min­i­mum amount. Approx­i­mate cost for a small com­pa­ny of 5 – 6 employ­ees min­i­mum of $1800 plus train­ing. ACT! is not a cloud-based pro­gram, but it can be accessed through a remote shar­ing pro­gram. I’ve heard it is a lit­tle slow and not as sta­ble. So ACT! con­tin­ues to be desk­top based, and I hope some­day con­sumers can choose ACT! for desk­top or in the clouds. 2. Sales­force (Cloud): Sales­force is the lead­ing CRM pro­gram for all sizes busi­ness­es. For the con­trac­tor, the price is expen­sive if you want all the fea­tures you get with ACT! A good starter pack­age is $25 per user/​month. To me this is very expen­sive if you have an office staff of 5 peo­ple. I’ve also dis­cov­ered that the best pack­age that has all the prop­er report­ing fea­tures is $65 per user/​month. This is the rea­son I don’t rec­om­mend Sales­force all that much, because in a few months, you could have pur­chased ACT! for the same price. Sales­force needs a con­trac­tor ver­sion that is afford­able. If you only have 1 – 2 employ­ees, this might be an option, espe­cial­ly if you want mobile capa­bil­i­ty. You can down­load a native iPhone App for Sales­force, and it works great. The only down­side I’ve seen with the mobile Sales­force App is the reminders for Events and Task are not an option at this time. As I said, every pro­gram has it’s weak­ness. I use reminders and emails all the time so I don’t miss appoint­ments. All in all, Sales­force is pow­er­ful, easy to use and cus­tomiz­able. 3. Zoho CRM (Cloud): Zoho CRM is a direct com­peti­tor of Sales­force. You get almost the same fea­tures with Zoho but for a lot less. A typ­i­cal con­trac­tor with all the fea­tures of Zoho CRM would prob­a­bly spend around $20 – 25 a month com­pared to the full $65 a month Sales­force pro­gram. If you are a small shop, you can use more than enough fea­tures of Zoho CRM for around $5 a month per user and be quite hap­py. Zoho just released an iPhone brows­er-based CRM, which also works pret­ty well. If you want­ed to have a very inex­pen­sive CRM pro­gram and have some decent mobile capa­bil­i­ties, you’ll like Zoho. It real­ly is going to be a threat to Salesforce…especially when they release their native apps. The native app is com­ing to the iPhone soon. I’ve used Zoho quite a bit and real­ly like a lot of the fea­tures. It lacks good inte­gra­tion with Google Apps but does work ok with Out­look sync­ing. One oth­er neat fea­ture is it inte­grates with Quick­books and Gmail for Google Apps. The cal­en­dar is not good! I use Google Cal­en­dar instead. 4. Sug­ar CRM (Cloud) Sug­ar is sim­i­lar to Sales­force and Zoho. They do pret­ty much the same thing. The pric­ing is less than Sales­force but more than Zoho. If you decide to try out Sug­ar, I’d wait a few more weeks til Sug­ar 6 hits the mar­ket. Sug­ar 6 is sup­pose to come with some amaz­ing upgrades includ­ing some mobile native Apps: pri­mar­i­ly the iPhone again. (Sor­ry Black­ber­ry and Droid). By the way, iPhone apps are easy to cre­ate, which is why they come out first. Droid is now sec­ond but catch­ing up. Black­ber­ry phones are for cor­po­rate Amer­i­ca. Don’t buy one now that you have Apple and Android devices. 5. Prophet (Desk­top): Most con­trac­tors are use to using Out­look for their emails, con­tacts and cal­en­dars. If you want to stay with Out­look and you don’t need a lot of mobile capa­bil­i­ties, Prophet is per­fect. It embeds itself right into your exist­ing Out­look pro­gram. Prophet is a full CRM pro­gram. It is not as ​“pret­ty” as ACT! or Sales­force, but it does the same things. Because Prophet is a desk­top-based soft­ware it has an upfront cost sim­i­lar to ACT! Their train­ing and sup­port over at Avid­i­an Prophet is excel­lent. A few oth­er CRM pro­grams that are large, yet I have not spend time sam­pling them: Max­i­mum CRM, Microsoft Dynam­ics, Land­slide and Ora­cle. All large CRMs and sim­i­lar in price to ACT! Lighter CRMs All the light CRM pro­grams I’ve tried are well designed and easy to use. I liked them all! They all just lack two way inte­gra­tion on mobile devices. The big fish still win on hav­ing most fea­tures. If you are not real tech­ni­cal or have the time to learn all the fea­tures of a full-blown CRM, start with one of these pro­grams. They are all quite refresh­ing and sim­ple. 1. Tac­tile CRM (Cloud and Google Mar­ket­place): Tac­tile CRM is a very sim­ple CRM. It man­ages con­tacts, oppor­tu­ni­ties, task list and runs reports. It is well designed and straight-for­ward. To be hon­est, the only neg­a­tive I had with this pro­gram is the lack of Mobile inte­gra­tion. Tac­tile CRM told me they are fin­ished mak­ing an iPhone App and just need to get approval from Apple. This native App will have the same func­tions as the online ver­sion and will have a 2‑way sync. One of the best things about Tac­tile is the price too! It is around $10 a user per month. If they don’t charge more for the iPhone App, I’d sug­gest most painters and small con­trac­tors give this CRM a try. I’ve spo­ken to many con­trac­tors who nev­er use all the func­tions in the big pro­grams like ACT! So start with Tac­tile. It does a lot, and if you want more…move to the big fish. 2.High­rise CRM: Updat­ed 9/18/16: High­rise CRM is a sim­ple yet very use­ful CRM. The cur­rent own­ers of High­rise have been work­ing very hard to keep up on the demands of their users. The over­all design has not changed much in the past 6 years. They’ve done minor UI improve­ments. Yet this is a time­less CRM that just is so darn easy to use. If you are look­ing for the eas­i­est CRM on the mar­ket, High­rise might be it! It still lacks the full cal­en­dar fea­ture. The workaround is you can cre­ate task in High­rise (which is awe­some) and then ​“feed” those task into your every­day cal­en­dar (RSS feed). So if I use Google Cal­en­dar as my pri­ma­ry sched­ule, I can see my High­rise task in the cal­en­dar. High­rise also has a few new fea­tures, like being able to send emails direct­ly from High­rise using their gmail plu­g­in. This saves the steps from hav­ing to bounce back and forth between your CRM and gmail if you are work­ing on sales. Orig­i­nal Post about High­rise in 2010: High­rise is more of a Con­tact Man­ag­er than it is a full CRM. High­rise is great for man­ag­ing leads, cus­tomers and small projects. It does not have a cal­en­dar pro­gram. To use a cal­en­dar pro­gram, you need to pur­chase a sub­scrip­tion to it’s sis­ter Back­back (a 37signal prod­uct). I’ve used Back­pack, and it is nice if you are by a com­put­er all day. The mobile sync­ing is not good and does not come close to Out­look or Google Cal­en­dars. Back­pack is meant for sales peo­ple that sit at a desk. I use High­rise for a cou­ple of things: tasked (that are emailed to me, yeah) and man­ag­ing cus­tomer infor­ma­tion. I love the new iPhone App too. I’m always typ­ing in to-do items, which are then synced to High­rise and emailed to me when the items are due. Down­side to High­rise? It lacks a great cal­en­dar fea­ture and a full mobile ver­sion for the cal­en­dar! If it had a cal­en­dar, it would be my num­ber one pick! 3. Cap­sule CRM (Cloud and on Google Mar­ket­place) Cap­sule is sim­i­lar to Tac­tile. It works well. I remem­ber lik­ing the cal­en­dar fea­ture bet­ter on Tac­tile, but again, Cap­sule is one of my favorite light CRMs too. This, like Tac­tile, lacks a good inte­gra­tion with the mobile devices. 4. Pipeline Deals CRM Updat­ed 9/18/2016 — see my com­ments at the begin­ning of this post.  (Cloud): I enjoyed try­ing out Pipeline. It has a mobile brows­er-base pro­gram which is nice, but lacks the 2 way inte­gra­tion to mobile devices.