Highrise CRM (discontinued) vs. Spokal

We chose to work with the Basecamp product and along with it came Highrise. They're a great 37 signals package together. So we chose to work with Highrise because of Basecamp

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For current Wordpress users Spokal is outstanding and highly recommended. For clients who don't already have a Wordpress blog it's a bit tricky as I need to first sell the benefits of using Wordpress in order to get them on board, but in all honestly I would recommend Wordpress anyway, it just slows the process down having to design and install Wordpress before we can get started.

• Easy batch upload of new contacts - if you gathered names and contact info for a bunch of people at an event or conference or what have you, put it in a spreadsheet and upload it for easy and efficient adding to the database.
• Simple communication and outreach tracking - each user has an individualized dropbox email address; you can BCC:, CC:, or forward an email to or from a client or contact, and Highrise automatically associates and records that email with the contact in the database.
• Task assignments - users can create and task assignments associated with specific contacts (ie - Send Suzy J. a gift box on Oct 1; Follow Marla K. and Billy Z. on Twitter & Facebook; Get an updated address from Nathan R.)
• Tags - easily create lists of contacts who fit certain needs (I need a: food blogger, in TX, who has a Facebook page - we have "food blogger", "TX," and "Facebook" tags in our system) that is then exportable; also useful for knowing the important associations of a particular contact.

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• Content calendar - the ability to visually see blog posts in draft and scheduled to publish over the coming weeks and months was a key benefit. Tracking this in spreadsheets is too hard. we can even post blogs as topic idea, pre draft, draft and final and schedule in advance so we can visualise the messages we want to communicate. Creation of tweets and Linkedin posts is done for you automatically. Simply drag the blog post to the time slot, day, week or month. This is a lot quicker than Hootsuite
• Additional tweets can be composed and also dragged to the calendar, plus the feedly link allows curation of tweet content. This just scales up our creation and curation process.
• Easy simple overview dashboard - showing key website stats, new visitors, new twitter followers. New blog posts. Social enagement per blog post, linkedin shares etc. simple lead scoring based on pages visited etc. Simple realtime SEO analysis on the blog post builder
• twitter builder. very simple autopilot of increasing your twitter following using key words (it easy has a simple key word tool) to find relevant people to 'like' and hence follow
• Dynamic, responsive team. I have asked a few questions about futures and always received a prompt helpful reply. Chris and his team are clearly commited to developing a great product.
• Once linked to your wordpress site I really like the fact I can log into a dashboard on the web and on my ipad and manage my content delivery and monitor visititors and interaction. I use and know hubspot and the biggest issue for me is the learning curve. Anyone can learn and use Spokal. It provides and integrates a number of tools I currently use today at a far lower cost. It does need to integrate into a third party email provider but frankly the integration is simple. A lot of effort has gone into the design for non techies

• Im actually pretty happy with the system as it is. The best aspect of Highrise is that it is very easy to work with - no need to struggle with manuals and lengthy training.
• Not really a problem I suppose but I pay for Highrise as part of a suite which includes other products - Basecamp, Backpack and Campfire. It would be nice to see more integration between these products.

• I personally would love to see more direct integrations into CRM and more powerful Marketing Automation tools, but the current Zapier integration is a general approach and works in most cases very well.

Highrise is easy to use, has a nice UI overall, quick to load, and does most of what we need.

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Spokal delivers everything I need to serve my clients in one place. It's so easy to use and their customer service is always available and responsive, there's no need for me to look elsewhere.

It's quick and easy to setup and use. There isn't any feature "bloat". Nothing to struggle with

Spokal takes away some of the complexity and noise that Wordpress has. Offering a separate login and dashboard to allow a user to create blog posts, check on backlinks, see ranking keywords, social engagement and tracks visitors/ contacts. Spokal provides a lot of functionality that would typically require the purchase of several products e.g. Hootsuite, SEO Moz, SEO pressor, Hubspot. What I really like is the content calendar. I simply drag and drop of my blog posts into my calendar to post to twitter, linkedin and facebook. This is an easy way to repost evergreen content and build my following on twitter. The twitter builder is constantly looking for relevant profiles and conversations based on my defined criteria. The tool automatically likes the twitter user which drives traffic to my sight and actually helps me find followers and potential influencers. This product is ideal for people new to internet marketing or small business owners who don't want to be overwhelmed by the effort to learn, manage and run several tools or wordpress plugins. I have been with Spokal since the start and I continue to be impressed by the support and raft of new functionality being added.

They are quick and SO nice. They are very friendly and are eager to help.

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They worked with Bluehost to make sure our blog connected properly. This was done without anyone from Strategic Revolution asking for this help.

Highrise is simple to use and is run by the same folks who build Basecamp and 37Signals. We wanted something that would do the essentials without the cumbersome bells and whistles. Salesforce is almost too complicated if you don't have a whole sales operation and analytics division. One day we will probably outgrow Highrise, but not yet.

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I haven't really tried other products at this point. I would say I tried to cobble together a bunch of options to make the right inbound marketing "tool suite". Nothing quite worked well enough. Again, Spokal serves as a very cost-effective option. Particularly relative to Hubspot.

• Better customer service, I am able to look up client info in a more organized way
• I feel that our efficiency has really increased. Highrise is a lot faster than our old program
• Highrise keeps us very organized. but it would be helpful if there was a project management section we could implement

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• It's still early for us, but we can definitively say that we've cut our content creation / curation time down by about 40% while INCREASING the volume of quality relevant content that our audience expects.