My wife has started an education business with a friend of hers, providing revision courses for various different exam levels, and entrance exams. (On the off chance that any of you are in the North London area with kids that need “top up” tuition, The Academic Zone might be worth a look!) So far it’s just the two of them, with a couple of helper/advisors (their “significant others” who help out with technology and design stuff), and the actual teaching is being done by a group of contractors. We helped them set up a low cost website and blog, which uses SiteKreator, and that has given them a nice, professional looking web presence. They’re just getting themselves in to a mess with their contact management and lead generation, with stuff in Excel files, and stray e-mails and bits of paper and the like. Very typical of a start up very small business (VSB) . They asked me to help sort it out, and the obvious thing to do was to set up a low cost, web based CRM system we can all use, provided the price is right.
I immediately though of Zoho CRM, but since I didn’t have time to do any extensive research I checked out the blog of my fellow Enterprise Irregular, Ismael Ghalimi. Ismael organized the first Office 2.0 conference last year, and is fast becoming the world’s expert in web based, office productivity tools. I found his CRM roundup, and a quick read confirmed that Zoho was probably the way to go. When I checked out the product, I discover that the full function version is free for the first 3 users. We need 3 users, so the price is definitely right! Taking a quick tour around the site, and the online demo I can see that Zoho CRM is pretty flexible and function rich, with a lot more than I would expect from a “free” product. Obviously part of the deal is that they want to catch companies early, and then as they become successful and grow they will become paying customers, and consider linking on to the rest of the Zoho family of products.
So, I’ve created an account and we’re off and running. In a few weeks time I’ll report back on how it’s going. Kim and Mary aren’t particularly web or technology literate, so it will be a good case study on how usable these kind of products are at this end of the market.
I’d recommend keeping watch on Ismael’s IT|Redux. He does a weekly bulletin on Office 2.0, and has a comprehensive database of the available tools. It will definitely give you some ideas and save you time.
