Few CRM’s are as powerful and cost effective as Accelo, which can be counted as one of the rare software options sitting snugly between entry level and Enterprise, with a price point that strongly appeals to the SMB market.

Managing customers data, our relationships with those customers, and gaining insights from those interactions, is a discipline unto itself. It can be a full time role within an organization; many companies invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in software and tools to manage the process; and yet it's still one of the areas the businesses spend the least effort to really nail. Your most valuable customers are often the ones you already have, but the ability to distinguish the high value customers for the rest, and to ensure you keep your customers happy in general, is easily lost in the noise of data, lists, and ambiguous reports. A solid Customer Relationship Management system (CRM) is a huge step in the direction of solving these problems.

Accelo is a Software as a Service (SaaS) targeted at the mid-market company. Accelo fits nicely in the no man's land between entry level tools and enterprise tools, providing one of the few options for businesses that need more sophistication than spreadsheets or a basic CRM, but aren't ready to take the leap into a Salesforce.com or NetSuite CRM. Accelo has made consistent and meaningful strides each year toward crafting an easy to use and incredibly flexible CRM tool for the mid market business. Built from the notion that other systems do and will exist in your ecosystem, Accelo focuses on doing several things, and doing them really well, leaving the rest of your business processes to other equally capable, and generally integrated, applications.

When we talk about configurable systems-- ones that can be crafted to meet your business goals through UI configuration rather than by writing code -- Accelo is near the top of the list. Just about every aspect of the system has been created with configuration in mind, allowing you to mold the system into a tool that feels custom tailored to your needs. One of the most powerful aspects of Accelo is the notion of Progressions, a framework for dictating the workflow different records will take, and the steps, triggers, and data that will be necessary at each phase. Your processes can be configured to be foolproof and templated, or flexible and accommodating, or both. Permission management has become one of the shining points in the system, ensuring users only see data and screens relevant to their roles. Accelo comes with native integrations to many common applications in the marketplace, and has a well documented REST API for custom development, ensuring there are many ways for your data to flow into and out of the system when needed. Finally, Accelo is more than just a great CRM. It's also a really capable Professional Services Automation (PSA) suite, adding even more value to your CRM data when used in conjunction with Project, Support, and Retainer management. For all these reasons, GRAYBOX really enjoys working with Accelo-- so much so that it's the CRM GRAYBOX uses internally. It's flexible, comes with a lot of out of the box features, and, dollar for dollar, occupies a unique place on the feature price matrix for competitors in the market.

Is Accelo perfect? No-- as with any software, there are areas in which it excels and others in which it's lacking. The native dashboards and reports in Accelo are still fairly rigid, and allow only minimal customization. While there are quite a few of them, if the existing reports do not meet your needs, there's little you can do within the application. Knowing this, Accelo has dedicated effort to building integrations to Power BI and Grow, two external business reporting and intelligence tools, allowing users to build sophisticated reports outside the system without writing code. As with many CRM tools, the true fit to your business is where the rubber hits the road, and Accelo sometimes has a last-mile challenge. It's challenging to know if it will meet 100% of your business needs until you've done an in depth evaluation of your business needs, and aligned those with the actual capabilities of the system.

This is where GRAYBOX can really step in to help. We have a team of Accelo experts that can work with your team to understand CRM best practice, your industry and business specific needs, and help you evaluate, and ultimately implement, Accelo as your CRM. As with any software, there's a varied matrix of needs and features, and the consultants at GRAYBOX can help you navigate that exercise to ensure you end up with the right tools for your needs.