Prophet CRM vs Business Contact Manager

A while ago I complained that CRMs are just too slow and unresponsive and support is always a headache.  Well the search for a decent and affordable Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software program has led me to abandon Business Contact Manager and try Avidian Prophet CRM On Demand.

Well Prophet CRM has some features that I like:

• Outlook integration (which I like as I’m also running LinkedIn for outlook which as CRM functionality too)
• List management (includes grouping and filtering for prospect companies which takes a little getting used to but still quite effective)
• More detailed and flexible reporting of pipelines, follow up dates etc
• Reasonably good online tutorials

However I have found it has the following disadvantages:

• Not free – and no free trail – I am using the On-Demand version at $20 a month.  The full personal version is $200.
• Outlook only
• Slow – although I’ve found this to be the case for all CRMs, particularly Outlook based ones which are resource hungry and web based ones which aren't AJAX or based on similar technologies.  Prophet appears to be just mildly faster than BCM
• Website Enquires – have to set up manual Outlook rules to move enquiries into the Opportunity Manager folder (haven’t tried this yet)
•  Contact sharing (Microsoft Exchange)requires Premium version $400
• Automated follow-ups requires Advanced Edition edition $300
• No timesheeting function
• Can’t be integrated easily

Their sales crew appeared to be completely automated which meant I couldn't get great pre-sales advice.

Some specific bugs did rear their head, although their support seems to be active.  One in particular I found annoying was that although I could generate reports with data in Excel, the inbuilt functions of the Report Manager (preview and view) in Standard modes did not work.  No matter what I did, they came up blank.  However their support staff called me on the phone and diagnosed the problem, which was a conflict with Brother P-Touch's software.  They also provided me with some training and advice.

Despite the problems, Avidian seems to be ok and slightly more productive than slower online CRMs - Salesforce sucks and SugarCRM is ok, but in my opinion fatally flawed.

CRMs are just too slow ....

One thing that has been frustrating me of late is that every single Customer Relationship Management system that I have tried is so incredibly slow ...

Years ago I used Maximizer and ACT. Neither of them costed more than a few hundred dollars. While I complained a bit about the lack of advanced features and occasional bug, one thing I never complained about was the speed. Running fully on the desktop, these programs enabled you to talk on the phone to customers while you recorded notes and made calcultations in real-time. Yet ever since ACT 6 or 7 (I can't remember which) this great product went to the dogs because it ran Microsoft SQL Server, .NET and bloated the system with memory issues slowing the whole thing down to a snails pace such that it became completely unusable. You'd spend minutes watching hourglasses while your customers would hang up in your face.

Since then I've gone through all sorts of web based CRM systems, which have the same interface issues. SugarCRM, vTiger, and basically come to the conclusion that they all suck. When you don't want to use them hosted and install them locally, you can add plenty of support headaches to the list.

My latest brainwave was to go back to basics and try Microsoft Business Contact Manager for Outlook. I've been using it for a while and though it offers the functionality and features I'm after I've found that it also runs incredibly slowly. Such that I'm going through the same headaches all over again. My laptop hardware should be more than up to the task, but somehow I'm doubting it is a hardware problem and once again I find myself suffering from "Slow CRM Syndrome". I did get a licence and with Office Small Business upgrade, it cost a few hundred bucks, so about the same as ACT, but probably a slightly better investment.

Anyway, I'm reluctant to even try the high end systems, because from what I've seen they are really no better in terms of performance.

There has to be a huge market for a slick, fast CRM that doesn't cost the earth (sigh) ....