Fran, thanks for your reply.
I'm aware that Method has a trial, as does Insightly, and most other CRMs. The problem is that the investment of time can be 20 hours or more by the point you figure out that any given platform can't fulfill a certain function. And if you test three... four... five or more platforms concurrently, it's an enormous time sink.
Method looks pretty good, but there are two areas that are missing for us. Specifically, converson of e-mail lead to contact record.
We receive leads from various advertising sources. Those leads are delivered via email in up to three different standard formats, depending on the marketing vendor. We need the ability for our sales inbox to be parsed for that information, and have it transferred to our CRM automatically. Or, if we use a 3rd party mail parser and have the data extracted to CSV or SQL, the CRM needs to be able to import those records, preferably automatically.
As to the other reporting, the basic process and 'pipeline' data for rep tracking is pretty boilerplate... lead to call, call to appointment, appointment to estimate, estimate to deposit. We all know that there's a ratio of success tied directly to whether or not a rep is following up with the customer, and that's typically where sales staff tends to slack off.
The other thing we need is simply a way to track ROI based on simple math - lead cost for a given month against orders written, - so we can determine if the ads we're getting are garbage and need to find another vendor.
I have experience with Joomla, WordPress and other such formats, so if it's a matter of using the platform GUI, it should be pretty simple.
Thanks again - hope you can help clarify the above.