Yesterday in the Linkedin BloggersYahoo group, Karen Ferrero asked a question about Highrise.

I am looking into some lightweight and user-friendly CRM packages for
my individual use. I really like Basecamp and see some good reviews
on Highrise. Can anyone with some experience actually using Highrise
give me their opinions on it? I would really appreciate it.

I dropped Karen a quick message back saying I loved Highrise and that I would fill in more details offline if she was interested. Stephen Collins from Acidlabs quickly jumped in and asked me to share more of my Highrise story with the group.

I’d actually appreciate you telling us all a short story of how you use
Highrise and for what purposes. I think those of us that don’t already
use a CRM system will gain a lot and those that do might gain
additional insight. I would certainly appreciate you sharing your
experiences.

So instead of just sharing with the Linkedin Bloggers Group I thought I would share with you all how I use Highrise and the difference that it has made for Working Solo.

My Highrise story starts in October last year - I was using Outlook for emails and contacts but having been a previous user of ACT is was looking for something a little more (but not as muc of the full CRM offering that ACT provided). I’d been using Basecamp for projects since earlier in the year, was very impressed and decided to give Highrise a go.

The export/import process for my contacts from Outlook to Highrise was a breeze. I then set to work allocating tags to each of my contacts. I love the flexibility that tags give me to sort contacts on any range of things - clients, suppliers, friends, family, colleagues (many of my contacts fall across multiple categories). I can also add tags for things like “referred by Sue” and then count up all the wonderful people that Sue referred to me and send her a person thank you note. The tags have allowed me to be a lot more efficient when finding information and people.

One of the things that I love the most is being able to see every contact’s history on one page. I can see their co-workers, an photo (I like to upload an image in particular for my clients so I get a more personal feel for them), contact details, images or files, and even bio information. Saves me time hunting things down in different places.

I also love the ability to use Highrise to track emails to and from my contacts. I’ve set up Outlook (yes I still use Outlook as an email client) with rules so that when I receive and email from a person in my contact list a copy of the incoming email is sent to my Highrise dropbox and filed next to the email address of the sender. If I’m in Highrise and click on the contact’s email address Outlook will open a new message with the recipient’s email address in the to field and my Highrise dropbox in the bcc field so that I can have a copy of the sent email filed against the contact’s record.

Even though I do an email backup to my external hard drive every Friday evening, using the Highrise dropbox option has been a great back-up alternative. I have peace-of-mind knowing that Highrise has all my emails to and from my clients, suppliers and major contacts covered even if the external hard drive has a problem (I don’t really need to worry about all the miscellaneous emails anyway).

As I use Basecamp for tracking to-do’s relating to the business I don’t really use the task option in Highrise for anything else except some personal reminders and tasks. It is great that I can see at a glance the tasks that are group under the headings of Today, This Week, Next Week, Later. I can see that changing though as I start adding extra team members to Working Solo. Instead of sending emails regarding things or people they want me to follow up, they will just be able to send me a follow up task instead.

The other thing that makes Highrise cool are the Cases. I have set up Cases for each of the internal Working Solo projects that I’m working on (client projects are tracked through Basecamp). This allows me to keep a track of all notes, communications and information relating to that project without having to check across multiple contacts.

Now all I want to do is find someone who can write me some hooks to link the API for Highrise to some of my other favourite SaaS applications like Campaign Monitor and Saasu.

All in all Highrise is a perfect fit for the way that I work and run Working Solo. 37Signals (the company that created Highrise) are quite clear that they don’t design their applications to be all things to all people, but it is a perfect for for this working solo business owner (soon to be team working solo??)

So … I hope this has answered Karen and Stephen’s questions about how Highrise works for me. If you have any questions or want to share how Highrise might work for you then just leave a comment.