Further question details: We are a surfboard manufacturing business with Wholesale, Retail and Online sales channels. We currently do not have a CRM and need help knowing which one to choose. We need advice which CRM is best to use- we’ve looked at Salesforce, Zoho & Hubspot but they are all too complex for our needs. We’d love a simple option that has solid reporting and the ability to handle our multi-channel approach.
Answer: From the extra details you’ve given me, it sounds like you want a CRM that is easy to use, quick to learn and can be built-in to your manufacturing process. There are plenty of project management options that will give you cost analysis including labour and COG but you’re looking for simple. I’d recommend that you check out Pipedrive for a simple, left-to-right Kanban board-style software program that also has some nice workflows that could be triggered for different parts of the manufacturing process i.e. if you’re doing custom orders, you could have one stage trigger an update email to the customer. If you’re looking for something to use on the factory floor that is pretty foolproof, check out Trello and have it set up on a large touch-screen tablet in each stage of the process. You’d then be able to have staff move cards/orders across the various stages easily. A downfall to using Trello is that it’s not a traditional CRM so you may want to capture the data on a card and then have an automation set up so the customer information is pushed to a lightweight CRM like OnePageCRM or Capsule at the end of the manufacturing process.
