Solve360: CRM for the rest of us?

As the owner of a growing business, I’ve long searched for an easy-to-use, practical, yet powerful (enough) CRM to manage our various contacts. The list that we’ve went through reads like a “who’s who” of SMB CRM solutions, but we may have found the ideal balance between usability and usefulness in Solve360 (http://www.norada.com/).

A product of Norada.com—I thought it had to be some Asian startup—Solve360 was easy to get into and in the week or so of trial use it’s proving itself to be more than flexible enough to fit our needs. Like our portfolio and project management solution @task (which we also use, but certainly not enough to take advantage of all the enterprise-level tools), Solve360 lets us configure the cumbersome data entry and filtering process to our liking, including the ability to relate a contact point to any other contact points based on the type of relationship.

Frankly, I think the success of a CRM solution depends on the user’s ability to consistently keep valid and accurate data points. However, it is difficult to try to fit what a “natural” company workflow is to an existing—and inflexible—system. That may mean changing how a company works in order to fit a CRM, and somehow that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

Solve360 seems to let us configure it rather than for it to configure us. It’s been only a week, but so far I’ve been impressed.