KarmaCRM Summary

KarmaCRM is a cloud based customer relationship management (CRM) application targeted at small to medium businesses. The use cases supported are basic contact, account, and opportunity management. A light transactional reporting tool with decent visualizations as well as a few out –of-box integrations to FreshBooks, Highrise, MailChimp, WuFoo Hosted Forums, and Google Calendar Sync.

KarmaCRM Webiste Review

I always like to take a look at a website to see how it is organized. KarmaCRM has a nice layout and is easy to navigate complete with pleasing colors. Who does not like a sunny day with green grass everywhere? This avid golfer sure does! Features are easy to find and browse. We will talk more in depth on features in a bit. Pricing is also available and easy to find. In less than 2 minutes a site visitor can browse the CRM features, review pricing, and determine if it is warranted to investigate further. Perfect.

“About Us” page?

I noticed that there is no About Us page. This is important. Most companies want to know a little bit about who they are dealing with. This is particularly true when you are buying a SaaS / Cloud application that will be the home to your precious company data! Hopefully the guys at KarmaCRM will read this and add an About Us section so we can get to know them better. With a bit of Googling I found the following expert from sellmorenow.

About the Company:
KarmaCRM was founded in 2010 by John Paul Narowski, universally known by his initials – JP. Prior to founding karmaCRM, JP was a founding partner of MetaSpring a Digital Marketing Consultancy that focused on the whole pie, rather than just a single slice of it. They design, develop, strategize, implement, and execute every project based on a proven process and solid planning. Their goal was to become a valuable partner who understands your business inside and out, and can help to provide a unified, long-term strategy to contribute to your business’s success. Their long and happy client list shows that the succeeded there.
Prior to MetaSpring, JP worked in the family business, Amish Tables. There, JP developed the company’s web presence and ecommerce sites. JP’s sales, recruiting and business development roles at both of these ventures forced him to become organized and methodical in all of his business processes. As had many other CRM founders before him, JP went through many CRM systems trying to find a simple web-based solution that catered to his sales process – without requiring a Ph.D. in CRM! After months of searching and consuming many sticky notes and spreadsheets, JP did not think any of the available solutions truly met his unique requirements. JP wanted a CRM solution that was simple without giving up power and that that affordably helped small businesses grow in their sales and customer relationships. JP envisioned a CRM solution built by small business salespeople for small business sales people. Thus was born, karmaCRM

A Social Approach to Customer Reference

The website has a “Buzz” section. This is an interesting way to demonstrate two things. One, people are talking about KarmaCRM and two, publically offer references with names of actual people right on the website. This is a very interesting approach. Customer referencing is usually a wholelottanonsense. Yeah, Yeah, I made that word up. Companies hold reference relationships hostage and only give names of people they have prepped to insure a glowing results. KarmaCRM’s more social approach just “puts it out there.” I like this very much. It gives me confidence.

First Look

KarmaCRM Look and Feel

KarmaCRM has a nice modern look to it and operates in a standard web application paradigm thereby making it easy for users to understand and adopt. Screen builds are smooth layouts are easy to read. This is a good start.

Contacts

The contacts module is the object where you manage humans. Contacts can be both Leads and Contacts that work at Companies. This is an important distinction or variation from other CMR applications where they have a distinct object for Leads. This may cause some scaling problems down the road if this application tries to move up market and customers require sophisticated Lead processing and distribution algorithms.

Companies / Accounts

The companies module is the object where organizations are managed. Excellent out of box options for company master data are included and adding custom fields is straightforward.

Cases

The cases module is the object where service requests are managed.

Reporting

KarmaCRM provides a number of basic reports right out of the box. There is also a very basic report writer that provides the ability to create your own reports.

Task Management

Tasks, Meetings, Notes, Calls are integrated to all the modules within the system.  This means you can associate activates to Contacts, Accounts, Cases, and Deals.

Chat Engine

KarmaCRM has a chat engine integrated into the primary use cases. Users can chat privately with other users and also create chat rooms with team members or other groups.  The system saves the transcripts so they can be searched later.  This is an interesting idea but, I am not sure it is that useful. Most organizations do not provide all employees with a CRM account. Further, even sales reps are not persistently logged in. Other solutions such as Skype are better as they are free to use and available on all devices.

The only real way to get a feel for any application is to take a test drive. Join me in a quick walkabout demo of KarmaCRM.

KarmaCRM Review > P1