Highrise is a very easy to use and yet powerful contact management product that is extremely useful for us. I like the fact that our staff, partners and even suppliers can access the system from whereever they are in the world - we are not all under one roof. It is the primary way we manage contacts at the point when they become strong prospects and then clients. A dialogue with these contacts/clients can be maintained within the system either by directly entering a note or by posting emails directly to a contact note. The email appears automatically in the client note history.
We can set and track tasks associated with a contact and assign these tasks to a team member for action. Each contact in Highrise can be "tagged" to allow easy filtering and I use this also to link to our Mailchimp account for email marketing purposes.
We make use of the "deals" feature of Highrise. A majority of our product sales are quite high value and involve a number of associated individuals. When a deal is created it can be associated with any number of contacts in the system and all emails, notes etc related to the deal are pulled together in one convenient history. Although the deal status is only allowed to be "pending", "won" or "lost" we use an app called "Salesclic" which links to our Highrise account and gives a much finer picture of the sales pipeline.
We deal a lot with healthcare products that are setup by our associates often in a private persons home. After the client setup or review the associate enters the client notes into Highrise so that we have a very good picture of client status. Any of us can access these notes (assuming permission is set) from anywhere using an iphone app or browser.
The CRM database allows for custom fields. We add custom fields to track equipment serial numbers, sales referral sources and warranty terms.
When looking at an individual contact there is provision in the system to see their Linkedin profile if they have one which is sometimes useful.