Highrise CRM (discontinued) vs. Smartsheet

I am not familiar with other contact management systems; before Highrise, we used a paper rolodex. But for our purposes, which have certainly changed over the last several years, we've been able to adapt Highrise to our needs. We've changed our tagging protocol - now, for example, we have social media tags, so I can narrow a contacts search down by contacts who have Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. And we've added fields in the Contact Info so that we can include links to those pages when they exist, and you can click on it to go directly to those pages. It definitely meets our needs, though we are a fairly small marketing department, under 50 employees who utilize Highrise, and probably far fewer who use it frequently. Particularly with the tagging system, I could see a large number of users creating useless and overwhelming numbers of tags

Incentivized

The Smartsheet platform is extremely similar to Microsoft Excel, so if you are familiar with Excel, you will pick Smartsheet up quickly. Even if you aren't Smartsheet has a relatively simple user interface, meaning just about anyone can learn it. One thing to note is that the interface is that some may consider the interface so simple that they feel the need to look for more robust platforms. If you have a small to medium project that needs to be manages in a central hub, Smartsheet would be a great fit. If you have a very large project, I might consider looking into more advanced platforms.

Incentivized

• Able to see all activity, this helps if you need to find out who made updates last.
• You can create different tags for clients. We have tags labels for each product the client has with our company, so when we need to pull reports it saves a lot of time.
• If a client has multiple people in the office you can add all their informaiton.

Incentivized

• The easy to use dashboard has enabled us get comprehensive view of projects across the entire business.
• It has streamlined internal communication with ease of sharing information across different teams.
• Smartsheet automates our workflows, enhances collaboration and ensures there are no data silos.
• I like that it saves time for us and ensures we spend less time switching between apps.

Incentivized

• Would like to be able to copy information from the right sidebar more easily without having to open up & edit the contact (like Skype or email info)
• When I start a search by tags and pull out information, I have to re-do the tagged search to pull it up again
• Takes a while to export a custom list

Incentivized

• Smartsheet set up is similar to Excel, yet when you upload an Excel file, things like conditional formatting are lost. Smartsheet has its own conditional formatting, and you have to reinstate the rules. It would be great if those would apply automatically once a file is uploaded
• Some Smartsheet management and access rules can take some tweaking to work properly. This may be a case of offering more info to admins so they can apply these better and with more efficiency

Incentivized

It's become the heart of our contact management system - it's low cost, simple to use and high impact for us. We are using a version that allows for unlimited employees, 50,000 Highrise contacts and 100 Gb or file storage. This means to us that this is scalable and sufficient for the foreseeable future. By using some other apps we can add some things that we need that aren't built into the product. We use infusionsoft but not as a contact manager for clients. When a contact in infusionsoft reaches a certain stage and we get more "hands on", we use Zapier to setup the contact in Highrise and create an embryonic deal. We like Mailchimp for email newsletters and Mailchimp syncs nicely with Highrise. Finally we use SalesClic to give us a more refined sales pipeline.

Smartsheet has made my work life easier. Reduced my email significantly. Smartsheet and SaneBox have got me leaving the office with 0... Yes 0 emails in my inbox. My inbox would reach 150-250 email per day. Smartsheet brought that number down significantly and SaneBox took it the rest of the way. Do yourself a favor and check out SaneBox, too.

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

Smartsheet is very easy to learn. However, while I have been able to pick it easily, Microsoft Excel and Project super users that I have trained on Smartsheet get bogged down in the differences and can find it frustrating. Explaining the differences ahead of time and why Smartsheet is being chosen instead of a different software seems to counteract those reactions

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

They're a smaller company but they've always given great service when we rarely need to reach out. Pretty good online content but a bigger user base would help to produce more content in a self-sufficient community much as we see with Salesforce. To be fair we haven't needed their direct customer support very often. The sales guys are nice and not too pushy!

Incentivized

Work with the Smartsheet support team to get the best overall. If no one in your organization has used Smartsheet before, the support team will get things started. We had a couple of people who had used this product before and it was a great help in getting our framework together how we wanted to use it.

We use to use Connectwise and Highrise is a breath of fresh air compared to Connectwise. We love that the 37 signal services are all web based. We can connect anywhere making working on the go much easier for everyone. Our challenge with Basecamp was that it was a computer program based product which made it very slow and inefficient. It also conflicted with our Mac computers because it only worked on a Windows platform. None of this is the case for Highrise. I've never had a load issue nor has it ever run slow. It's up to the minute with any updates and entries. The categories it offers is wonderful and very appreciated. Organization is key, and it's the best way to keep everyone on task. Overall, we are very happy with the product

Incentivized

Smartsheet is a dedicated project management tool that is built on spread sheet principles. When compared to Microsoft's own offering, Smartsheet came out on top in some areas like dedicated project management features vs having to build custom features to Microsoft 365. However when you compare them on price, Microsoft 365 definitely has more value than Smartsheet.

Incentivized

• We use it to streamline and assign inbound sales calls.
• Sales reps use it to automatically store correspondence , schedule follow ups, and note requirements.
• We download the text data and apply big data techniques to learn about customer needs and product requirements in the aggregate.

Incentivized

• Our positive ROI has decreased the overall cost in project management as it reduced the amount of MS project licenses we needed.
• We have also seen a positive ROI on using the cloud storage and it automatically supports proper version control.

Incentivized