We’re at the beginning stages of setting up professional services for our company – payroll, accounting, PR, crm, project tracking, etc.
I’ve received a lot of recommendations from others about who we should use, but I’m more interested to hear who we should avoid. I find that there tends to be bias in recommendations, so I thought I’d try the opposite.
Is there anyone you’d suggest staying away from? If so, why?
I'd recommend you don't hire a PR firm at all. Do you it yourself, go to events, do networking, try to reach out to journalists in an honest and helpful way, and you will get much better results in the long term. You will also save a lot of money.
I consult medium sized, corporate companies on cloud services.
Many think that's ridiculous however there are multiple nuances, incorrect selections can cause a loss into the millions given their head counts.
This question is also far too vague, we're fortunate enough now to have specialist services within each niche... So whatever your startup does or focuses on will correlate differently to your needs.
The central CRM is however pivotal, getting this wrong can be so costly whatever the size of your team. Avoid Yammer, they've stood still for 2 years since Microsoft bought them, key employees left. Avoid Box, levie talks great but his product resembles a windows office suite with a shit App Store...
I'd suggest you think carefully about your primary objectives over the next 90 days and what's essential.
Is there a "wrong" CRM? Or it all depends on your needs?
It depends on the communication needs... many companies need a space to collaborate or share ideas, such as creative agencies, architectural studios etc... many companies need a space for economical and decisive decision making, such as law practises or accounting firms etc...
I'd avoid Yammer purely because they are not moving forward and have limited app store options...Box, for all their big talk have a very average product that is not convivial for the user. There are more affordable alternatives out there, such as Slack or SendtoInc... maybe Blossom.io for creative or development teams. However, it depends how mobile your workforce is, where they need access to information and where the majority of their workflow takes place, i.e. in a desktop or tablet.
The best thing you can do is to know exactly what you want, force ranked and hold any professional services' firm's feet to the fire in terms of results. Don't pay by the hour if at all possible. Set KPIs and manage to them, or they will eat you alive.
If you're looking for non biased, objective software advice, it's out there. Don't bother with gartner--too expensive, limited companies covered; and avoid those free review sites, they're full of spam and shills.
Mixpanel. Avoid it like the plague. Gets super expensive and their goal is to milk money, not really help startups. Least flexible with billing we've ever dealt with.
If you are going to use them, use only the People section for a few hundred a month.
A good alternative: Count.ly