BlueHead switches to Highrise

After spending a little time working in Highrise, a Customer Relationship Management tool by 37Signals, it was clear that their "Goodbye to bloat" tagline was inherently obvious.

Our initial concerns in dropping SugarCRM (our current CRM tool):

• Would we miss all of the cool feature sets: detailed tracking for the entire customer pipeline from target to contact/deal, and crazy detailed reporting?
• Frankly, we never used any of the functionality. In point of fact we found ourselves constantly going back and forth about how to enter a contact... "Are they a target...or a lead...oh wait!...do we enter them here...or here...what's our procedure again?...oh crap! where did I put that note about my phone call yesterday?...wait, what's the contact's name again?"
• Would we miss the cool looking eye-candy of charts?
• NEVER USED THEM ONCE
• Sugar has been around forever and Highrise is relatively new
• Translation: Highrise is built for today's web without complicated retrofits
• Sugar charges an arm and a leg for all the web 2.0 stuff (that's right I said 2.0 as in 2.yesterday)

Anywho...

So it came down to one word: simplicity. As an independent, constantly-morphing publishing house living in a wonderfully evolving market, keeping it simple matters and we avoid the word "procedure" like the plague. If you need to wrap a procedure around complicated administrivia, it is just too complicated. At least, we try to keep that in mind.

AND, for all you tech-head types out there, they are a Ruby/onRails shop, so you know they are relevant!