CRM for Small Business
Leopard CRM, the easiest way to transform your business. Leopard CRM is a customer relationship management system designed for small and medium sized businesses.
Pivotal seems to be a relatively unknown name in Australia, but they offer powerful mid-level CRM solutions for medium sized enterprises. Unfortunately, my experience of the system has been in a large, complex environment with around 200-300 users and 10 million database records. I say unfortunately because the Pivotal CRM solution does not scale well to this level.
One of the main features of Pivotal’s systems is the level of customisation that it offers. Simple customisation can be made with standard GUI Pivotal tools. This means that someone with a reasonable amount of technical knowledge and a little training can customise the system, including reports, searches, and form design.
It’s fair to say that almost anything can be customised, right down to the work flow of the system, although some of the more advanced customisation features requires quite a lot of technical skills and knowledge of the system. This level of customisation certainly has advantages, but there is a downside. As the system is designed to be generic, it results in inefficient database connectivity and relatively slow and clunky architecture. This is not necessarily a problem, but it does place limitations on scalability.
The Pivotal CRM environment gives you plenty of possibilities including comprehensive enterprise tools, two clients, and many connectivity options. The toolsets could be better named and organised however. Not only is there similarly named tools that perform totally different tasks, Pivotal have a habit of renaming these tools often.
Their support team is fairly knowledgeable, and they also offer online training, but they do have a heavy reliance on overseas resources, using India in particular. This can introduce some communication difficulties, which can be rather frustrating considering that you’re accessing these resources when you’re either trying to learn, or when you’re wanting help.
I think that their pricing and scalability limitations place them squarely in the mid-sized market. I wouldn’t recommend the product for small or large enterprises. If you’re in this category and looking for a CRM solution, Pivotal may have everything you need, just be aware of the limitations it also brings.
I use pivotal everyday at a large company in the US. I’ve been trying to find some sort of review on Pivotal, unfortunately there’s not much. Pivotal is quite possibly the worst CRM I have ever used. It’s clunky, the interface hurts my eyes, it looks like it was created by a teenager as a side project for his Computer Science class, actually that’s an insult to teenagers everywhere, a low IQ 12 year old could program a better CRM. I have no idea why my company continues to buy, and use this program (probably because its cheap). All I can say is you get what you pay for.
You better off with using ACT! or Salesforce IMHO.