WordPress Designers and Developers in Minneapolis, MN

A Better CRM: WordPress Themes as a Competitor to 37 Signals

October 9th, 2010 — Blog Post, Wordpress

I was just trying out 37 Signals‘ highly-successful Highrise platform, and I must admit that I was underwhelmed.  It seems that it would be pretty easy to pump out a WordPress theme with similar/better functionality. Plus, I could customize it to meet my exact needs and not be bothered with extra features that I will never use.

In a nutshell, Highrise does two things that I need:

  • Track bids/deals
  • Track contacts/people/relationships (i.e. CRM)

Creating the bids/deals portion would be a simple matter of using categories to for “proposed deals” and “accepted deals”.   We could then add post meta data for “Who is this deal with?”, “Name the deal”, “Describe the deal”, “How much?”, “Category”, “Who is responsible for the deal?”, and “Who can see this deal?”  The notes for the deals could be stored in the initial post as well as in follow-up comments to the post on the front end of the site.

Tracking relationships with people could be done in a very similar manner.  We could create a post category for “contacts” and then add meta data for “First Name”, “Last Name”, “Title”, “Company”, “Phone”, “Email”, “IM”, “Skype”, “Website”, “Twitter”, and “Address”.  Then add initial notes in the post content.  Use the WordPress commenting system for follow-up notes.

Sounds pretty simple.  The proof will be in the pudding.  I plan on giving it a go tonight.

Interested in the theme when it’s complete?  Let me know!

6 thoughts on “A Better CRM: WordPress Themes as a Competitor to 37 Signals”

  1. Chris on said:

    Yes, I’d be interested in that kind of wordpress theme.

    Although I think one of the key features for having everything in one place in such a tool is ability to easily include e-Mail convos just with a bcc to highrise.

  2. toby on said:

    @Chris, The purpose of this theme is to cut Highrise out of the equation. It’s an alternative to Highrise and a fully-customizable CRM built on WordPress.

    I actually built the theme and have been using it successfully for over a month now.

  4. kuif75 on said:

    hey @Chris

    im very interested, can i see it? a demo version somewhere?
    please help

  6. toby on said:

    @Jean-Pierre – Fantastic! I have been planning to release it to the wild “soon” for about a year now. Perhaps you can light a fire under the project. :)