Ask HN: How Do You Manage Leads Properly?

7 points by Terpaholic 12 years ago | 11 comments

I'm at that stage where the product is built, and it's time to reach out to leads. However, it's getting overwhelming quickly.

I was wondering if anyone has a system or process for managing cold email or cold-call leads? Right now I basically have a massive Excel spreadsheet and am considering Boomerang for receipt/click management. I feel there has to be a more methodical and steady way to reach out to hundreds of leads while maintaining each thread & progress state properly.

In my particular case, I'm currently cold-emailing but depending on the larger scale results could switch to cold-call.

ilkkao 12 years ago |

I once met a guy in Ruby meetup who has built https://www.myphoner.com/ Sounds like it's something you are looking for.

dennybritz 12 years ago |

Have you looked at Radius (http://radius.com/)? Never used it, but recently came across it while doing market research.

robdoherty2 12 years ago |

I don't have the task of managing leads, but I think salesforce is the standard certainly beyond a certain size. Not sure if that is too big for your use case.

Terpaholic 12 years ago | |

I looked at salesforce and my understanding was "it has everything, at scale, and costly". The IBM or Oracle of sales was the impression I got. It seemed a bit too much for one person to use for themselves.

slgeorge 12 years ago | | |

If long-term your plan is that company is just going to be _you_ then keeping it simple is the right idea. Using a simple workflow with a Google form feeding into a spreadsheet with status on it will work perfectly well.

If you think that you're going to be dealing with the same customer on multiple occasions so you'll want to record the history of your interactions then you'll need a CRM. If you want to build up a database of people who showed interest that you'll then talk to regularly, then you'll probably want CRM. Finally, if your intention is to scale the company and so have many people talking to prospects and customers then you definitely need CRM.

Salesforce is the most well-known and it's relatively easy to get started with, very Cloudy and has a platform so you can build operations on it. You reference Oracle, they (and Microsoft) have complete enterprise solutions which are at a different level. SF is more at the middle of the pack. It's well-known and many people are familiar with it. But you're right, it's a full CRM so it does far more than just tracking your leads.

There are other light-weight Cloud solutions out there, and SugarCRM is probably a good Open Source option that (as a technologist) you could easily use.

verganileonardo 12 years ago |

Where I work, we use Podio (now part of Citrix).

It is free (until you reach 5 users) and is fully customizable. I highly recommend.

vsergiu 12 years ago |

have you tried pipedrive? (https://www.pipedrive.com/en/home/welcomeback) or you are looking for something open source?

Terpaholic 12 years ago | |

Wow! This looks exactly like what I'm looking for. Thanks! Will give it a try and see if it fits.

kinj28 12 years ago |

pipedrive.com

Terpaholic 12 years ago | |

This looks pretty great.

For future visitors to this thread: I've discovered that toutapp and yesware have integrated email receipt + click tracking along with a pseudo pipeline which actually fits my purpose of tracking email leads pretty well.

My only hesitation with toutapp/yesware/boomerang is data gravity - I don't think the information from any of those can be exported, effectively locking you in.

Alphabetical Summary of Results:

* BoomerangGmail - boomeranggmail.com

* ContactMonkey - contactmonkey.com

* MyPhoner - myphoner.com

* PipeDrive - pipedrive.com

* Radius - radius.com

* SalesForce - salesforce.com

* Streak - streak.com

* ToutApp - toutapp.com

* Yesware - yesware.com

joerich 12 years ago | | |

* Zoho - http://www.zoho.com/

This one can be useful too.