Geoffrey Graham

Carlson’s Law

In a world where so many people now have access to education and cheap tools of innovation, innovation that happens from the bottom up tends to be chaotic but smart. Innovation that happens from the top down tends to be orderly but dumb.

– Curtis Carlson

HT Charles Marohn

CRM for SMB: Weighing our options

A few days ago, I posed this question, via Twitter and emailed a similar question to about a dozen business owners:

Who do you use for CRM? Especially interested in hearing about Salesforce alternatives with strong funnel reporting for 10+ person teams.

I received a ton of feedback, and many people asked that I share what I learned. We haven’t made a decision yet, but we’ve done a bunch of due diligence, and here’s my preliminary summary.

Some background:

We’re presently running Salesforce.com’s Group Edition, and our license caps out at ten users. We’re bumping up against that cap now, and need to make a change in the not-too-distant-future.

We’re presently paying $950 per year for up to 10 users. I don’t know where that pricing came from, but we’re pleased to have it and feel like it’s a great deal. We do suffer some inadequacies with the Group Edition, chief among them are no support for third-party integrations and no access to our data via the Salesforce API.

To eliminate those inadequacies, we’ve planned an upgrade to the Professional Edition when we hit our 10-user cap. The time is nigh, and a few things are causing me to scrutinize the decision to renew with Salesforce: Continue reading “CRM for SMB: Weighing our options”

Every parent of a son should read The Wonder of Boys

Being a parent of a son and a daughter, I’m regularly amazed at the differences in how my children develop and view the world. Those experiences, along with some recent articles discussing the relative merits of masculinity and femininity in our culture, have gotten me digging into the topic of boys.

I’m only a couple chapters into listening to Michael Gurian’s The Wonder of Boys (2006), and I am already blown away. The bulk of what I’ve heard so far addresses the unique, inalienable, and inextricable ways in which males (especially boys) process information, emotions, and the world around us. As a parent (and a man), I find it fascinating, useful, informative, and compelling. Continue reading “Every parent of a son should read The Wonder of Boys”