Good reviews/comparisons of Contact manager/Sales Force Automation software?

Here's a bit of feedback I've collected from a good friend who is a top notch sales rep :

"About 3 years ago I worked at medium sized company with a sales force of 6 direct sales people plus another 6 support staff. The company had used Maximizer for several years and wanted to upgrade to something that was “scalable.” I was asked to participate in the review process and we considered the following products; Maximizer, Maximizer Enterprise, Act, Goldmine and SalesLogix. Act and Goldmine are very “lightweight” and not great from a salesman point of view however they both work nicely with MS Office and other Microsoft products. The real competition was between SalesLogix and Max Enterprise. From a salesman’s point of view Maximizer is a much more powerful tool however SalesLogix works very well with Microsoft products. In the end it came down to the following. Maximizer is a great tool for sales people – it functions like sales people work – if you want to make a number of phone calls, send emails or track your contact with clients and potential clients it is great. If you want to mine data from Maximizer to use in reports it can be difficult. Maximizer also doesn’t play nice with Microsoft – so that can pose challenges too. SalesLogix works great with Microsoft, has amazing reporting functionality and is absolutely **** to use as a sales person. It is as though SalesLogix was designed by accountants to keep track of sales people whereas Maximizer was designed by sales people to keep track of customers."

Hope this is of value to anyone else trying to make a decision.

- R.

Goldmine is anything but lightweight. It's a horrible interface though. It comes down to the type of user base - if they are technically savvy than Goldmine is an option - if not, than I wouldn't even bother with it. Act is a joke in a networked environment - stand alone it's okay but it's a toy compared to everything else.

If all you want to do is manage keep record of sales calls and share the history of activities with a small work group - you can't go wrong with Maximizer. If you want a sales manager to micro-manage a sales team, Maximizer does a better job. There two many quirky things with Goldmine that make the user experience.... wanting. From a power or customization standpoint, Goldmine trumps everything that isn't full blown CRM.

On a side note, I read in a post that there is a belief that you can scale Goldmine from the Dbase edition to the SQL edition - you can, but FrontRange will not give the user any financial benefit for the switch - it's like being a brand new user. Good news, you get to keep the customizations and data created in Dbase - bad news - it's expensive.