Free/Open Source CRM where the Lead is seen as a Company

Question

Short
I am looking for a CRM where the Lead's are considered as Companies with multiple contacts, not individual people.

Longer
We have been using Zurmo and it is ineffectual for our aims. We work in the education sector. A lead is a school. Not an individual. Within a school we can have upwards of 10 contacts without the school yet becoming an account. Additionally, staff come and go. One lead we are chasing at the moment, the Primary Contact for that school left and moved to another school. We need to be able to manage this kind of job movement.

There are millions of Companies which sell directly to other Companies rather than individuals. So considering this will be a somewhat common scenario I am hoping to find an out of the box CRM which can manage this.

The ideal scenario will be a CRM where the Leads are business names. The Leads may have multiple contacts associated with them. When the Lead converts to an Account, it simply converts to an Account and the Contacts that were associated with the Lead are now associated with the Account.

Criteria
The CRM is free and ideally open source. We are a startup and cannot justify the excessive pricing structure of a tool such as SalesForce, which for the 5 of us would cost at least £1200/yr (and possibly not meet our requirements at that lowest pricing level).

I hope I've explained this well enough. If not, please ask.

Cheers,
Joe

Answer 1

If you still haven't found anything, why not have a look at Simitless? It is a platform that enables you to create your own information system/data management app (in your case, your perfect CRM). It gives you modules/fields (like spreadsheet columns) that you can select from and tailor the app to track/collect only the data you need.

• You can organize your Lead to be a Company and link/unlink the corresponding Contacts to it as the situation develops.
• Your CRM will be online and accessible by all your teammates and in real-time.

It is not open source and not exactly free (as in beer) but it has a generous free tier that would normally allow you to go for quite a while. Even as your business grows and you need to up your quotas, you just pay for what you need. You're never locked in so you can take your data out at any time and not pay anything.

Full disclosure: I am part of the startup that designed that platform. (And yes, since we too are a startup, we understand your financial limitations very well.) We just launched recently, still in beta. If you want to try it out and need some help, I can definitely give you a hand. Just get in touch. (If you want to quickly try it out, there is a Lead Focused CRM template that I have made from what you have described that you would like to track.

A quick view of what the template with some dummy data looks like

and the Lead as a Company (the "Represented By" column leads to another data type that contains all the contacts that can be linked/unlinked to your lead):

And, since it is just a template, you can take it as a basis and modify it to your heart's desire.) It might be just what you are looking for. And let me know how it goes, if you decide to give it a go.

Answer 2

I am using an old version of "Sugar Community Edition CRM" where you can create Leads and attach an "Account" to it at creation time. The Account is used as the "Company". So you can create may Leads against the same Account.

Even though this version is discontinued, you can take a look at SuiteCRM which is a fork/successor/improvement on the old SugarCRM.

You can run it in any Apache/MySql/PHP enviroment on your local network, laptop, or on the internet.