Finding my ‘CRM’ was something like an odyssey. After a few exchanges in a few forums and with Norada support it dawned on me, that is rather the rule than the exception.

This is my short story of how this came about. May there be interesting tidbits for others facing comparable problems.

It all started off with CabChap developing faster than anticipated. telfish being an B2B business, didn’t generate many leads, we were able to handle them with the standard Mac address book.
CabChap on the other hand, is pure B2C play. And as leads, partner requests, customers, bugs and that stuff started rolling in, I needed a more capable solution.

Everybody knows 37signals and salesforce, so these were the obvious places to start. I tried Highrise first, being an avid user of Ruby on Rails I deemed it fair for them to get the first shot. But I somehow didn’t get the hang of it, found it was lacking to much in terms of integration with my contact and mail database.

On to salesforce: Everybody knows them, seemed to me, it’s the gold standard of CRM on the web. Wrong! It feels reasonable fast, but it looks, feels and IS way over-engineered. It probably has all the (little) features I wanted but 1.) at a price in terms of money, and 2.) in terms of a steep learning curve.

Features I required:

• Integration with my contact database on MobileMe (or Google for that matter) – I am a heavy iPhone user
• iPhone app or at least iPhone-enabled access
• Integration with my mails (MobileMe or Google as well – I ended up switching contacts and mail to Google because they are interfaced the most to other solutions)
• Have the ability to put notes and tags to contacts easily
• Be affordable
• ‘Handle Projects’ is an optional plus that Solve360 delivers, it wasn’t on my list at first

After 37signals and salesforce I turned to small solutions for SMBs like BatchBook and TactileCRM. I like them way more, but they both felt clunky to use, like Web 1.0 – plenty of page reloads and SLOOOOW, at least from Europe. Maybe that is different from the US/CA. Actually I preferred BatchBook over TactileCRM, the latter producing a few significant display-problems in my beloved Safari browser.

On to a short stint with Gist. Gist.com is something like a external information aggregator for your address book, feeds, blogs and Gmail. It pulls together all this information and helps you stay informed about what is going on with you important accounts. It bills itself ‘social CRM’ but its less CRM and more social. I am still playing with it, but more to find out if I may have other uses for it. Check it out, it’s worth a trial.

So, a few days and a few address book rebuilds later, I found a hint on the CRM solution Solve360 from Norada. At first its an awkward mixture of CRM and project management. But the UI looked so good and it felt like it was engineered with passion (something I am very susceptible to as an avid Apple user). So after a few hours of importing my stuff and reading through the CRM forums I almost felt relieve, this could be it – at least for me.

So next morning I took the plunge and started to migrate all my stuff to Solve. Then I couldn’t help it, I had to push my luck. I activated two very cool beta features that Solve is about to deliver: Google Contact Synchronization and Google Mail Integration. This sounds to good to be true, none out there, delivers a tight live integration of the most important poor-man’s tools. But as I said, I hit a few problems here. At first the sync wouldn’t work, this was resolved within hours by helpful Norada support staff.
But once the integration worked I got all my contacts (1000+) into Solve and this was not what I wanted. But again, very helpful staff sorted out (my) mess in a few hours and I am good to go again. What really shocked me was, how understanding and empathetic support was (thanks Mike!). Live email integration worked somehow nicely, but then again I have a complicated setup with different SMTP-servers for the different projects, and compared to the fantastic Gmail Client it has to lack big time. Remember, these both promising features are beta, so things will improve further and I will probably try them again one day.

So, my setup looks like this now: I keep my contacts in Mac and iPhone address book, my emails in Apple mail and Gmail and all neatly synced with Google Sync. This works like a charm, is fast as hell and push-y (and free, but thats not so important for me). I keep Solve separated, but mails for my projects are automatically forwarded to Solve via Gmail filters to my Solve360 dropbox. Sending mail is triggered via the Solve web app and then automatically sent to the dropbox as well (via bcc). Looks and works good so far.

If you have any questions or tips, don’t hesitate to leave me a note below.

Bonus tip: Back up your contacts in different formats (VCard and CSV preferred). You’ll need these files for import into your chosen system anyway – and I messed up my contacts db in the process a few times.