Kudos to High Rise CRM, another brilliantly simple, but extremely usable application from 37 Signals

I have never been a huge fan of CRMs. I know they are necessary and without them effective sales, business development, and client support would not be possible, but they are still painful to manage. My primary beef with most CRMs is the the fact that they all try to provide every piece of functionality that any user ever might want and the end result is a cluttered, unusable dashboard of feature sets of which only a small percentage are ever used. As a result, the load and wait times become unbearable and it seems as though there are 6 steps to be followed every time you pick up the phone, send an email, or meet with a prospect or client. God forbid you get really busy for a few days. It might take you a full day just to try and get everything loaded into the system properly.

Two months ago, I was looking for a simple contact management system to keep up with my intensified focus on Business Development and decided to see what 37 Signals had to offer. Within minutes, I was up and running, happily loading contacts into my new High Rise Account and I never even had to call in the techies. For the first time in my life, I actually enjoyed using the CRM. It is so easy and intuitive that anyone can use it and it is actually designed to make the user’s life easier. While most systems are built first around the kind of trend data and reporting metrics that can be pulled with the user a distant afterthought, HighRise is built to help the user keep organized.

Oh, by the way, did I mention it is free? That’s right, you can use it for up to 250 contacts absolutely free and the paid versions are extremely affordable as well. I am not sure if the back end functionality will support everything that a large organization might want, but for anyone who is looking to get organized and looking to build an easy, usable contact database, I highly recommend it.