Today we officially announced a big new Highrise feature called Deals. Deals lets you keep track of proposals, bids, and estimates you’re submitted, won, or lost.
This new feature is especially handy for designers, developers, contractors who bid on projects for clients. Now you’ll know which proposals are still out for bid, when you sent them, who you’re expecting to hear back from, which ones you won, which ones you’ve lost, and how much money you’ve made from each customer.
I wish I had Highrise Deals when we were doing website design. I had a hard time remembering all the RFPs we’d responded to and how many projects we’d won or lost and why we’d won or lost them. Saying I was disorganized would be kind.
The best way to get a feel for the new feature is to watch a video demo:
(See a bigger, clearer version on the Product Blog)
If you don’t have a Highrise account, sign up today. If you do, we hope you find Deals useful! Thanks again for your continued support.
Matt Carey
on 21 Oct 08I started using this yesterday and it looks like it will be really useful!
Bob Martens
on 21 Oct 08Awesome, anther useful feature. Backpack + Highrise are becoming the backbone of my little personal business.
Tim
on 21 Oct 08@Jason
Great video as always, though – quick question.
Why the use of the ”$” icon? The icon doesn’t seem to serve any purpose other than to look pretty.
Wouldn’t it be better to simply eliminate the use of the icon all together?
JF
on 21 Oct 08Tim: The icon is used elsewhere in the app to denote a deal. If there’s a note about a deal on the Dashboard it will have the deal icon. Same for cases (case icon) or people (avatar or generic person icon).
Don Schenck
on 21 Oct 08Good work, Jason and crew.
Robert Ohlson
on 21 Oct 08I need the option ” ” or “Kr.” because I use Norwegian kroner and EURO.
Is it possible?
JD
on 21 Oct 08Robert Ohlson, Deals supports EURO as well.
Steven Landau
on 21 Oct 08That’s great, now we really need a way in basecamp to:
1) Archive Projects so they are not on the list. 2) Close/Archive Messages so they are not on the list
JF
on 21 Oct 08Steven, you can archive Basecamp projects.
Tom
on 21 Oct 08This is great. Since we use both tools extensively, this makes me wish that Highrise and Basecamp “spoke” to each other so they could share contact info and once a deal is approved, it turns into a project with a history of the discussions.
Thanks 37s!
JF
on 21 Oct 08Tom: Yup, we agree. We have some ideas.
M...
on 21 Oct 08deals is enabled in my account since about a week. why do you post about this so many days later?
Dave Woodall
on 21 Oct 08We started our business 6 months ago with $5,000 and the 37signals suite. It is because incredible innovations and improvements like this that we’re on target to do $500,000 in sales this year. Thank you!
Laura
on 21 Oct 08I quit using highrise about a year ago, but you may have won me back with this feature
Reilly Sweetland
on 21 Oct 08Great feature! This feature may push us over the edge as well.
I second Tom’s comment above. Basecamp has been at the core of our business since 05, so my #1 request would be integration between the two. (Ex: Having customers information kept up to date in both systems, not having to copy / paste project descriptions, re-upload files into both systems, etc.) This would be spectacular.
Geoff DiMasi
on 21 Oct 08I love this feature, but I feel like the pricing is off.
$24/month only gets you 5 deals.
I am assuming this also counts the deals you didn’t win.
It is clear that you are pushing the $49/month plan, however, the pricing below that is not enticing enough.
I was about to upgrade from a free account to the $24/month one and decided the value wasn’t there.
Please price these lower plans so that I can get hooked and move up like I did with Basecamp and Campfire.
Let me test out a reasonable number so that I have no choice but to upgrade.
p.s. I have the $49/month Basecamp plan and the $24/month Campfire plan.
JF
on 21 Oct 08I am assuming this also counts the deals you didn’t win.
Deal counts only count pending deals. So you can have hundreds of won/lost and it wouldn’t count against your pending total. This is the same as cases—closed cases don’t count against your total.
If you don’t want any limits, you can move up to Plus for unlimited deals and cases (and a lot more disk space and contacts too).
Paul Smith
on 21 Oct 08I’m with Geoff. I would upgrade to a $24 a month plan if it included even say… 25 deals. The thing is sometimes I give multiple quotes to clients so they can choose which one they want to go with. I’d use 5 in a heartbeat, but I don’t want to pa $50 for JUST deals. I think you should include a little more :)
Geoff DiMasi
on 21 Oct 08Thanks for clarifying that.
Still think that the pending deals number isn’t at the sweet spot.
I know that will be for you to determine, but just wanted to let you know my thoughts.
Something like 8-10 pending deals for the $24/month plan would be perfect.
As I said, love the feature. Good job on that.
Tony
on 21 Oct 08If I’m not mistaken, Google Chrome was used in the demo. Good show.
JF
on 21 Oct 08Tony, it was Safari.
Edgardo Jimenez
on 21 Oct 08I am with the guys that wrote about the pricing. I use the basic paying plan and started adding deals immediately. After 3 I received the message that I needed to upgrade. I almost did that only to notice that the next plan only included 2 more deals. Going from $12 to $50 is a big jump. I would use the $24/month if it included at least 10 deals.
Other than that i think its great. I was using Excel for this.
Bradley Skaggs
on 21 Oct 08Hi Guys,
Awesome addition to Highrise! Love it and have needed it since I first began using it a back when it first launched. My only problem with it is the limit of Deals I can have at any one time with my current plan. We’re small but have a lot of leads that we need to track. I can’t justify $50 for unlimited Deals. Anyone else feel this way?
Keep up the great work 37 Signals!!!
-b
JF
on 22 Oct 08FYI, we’ve doubled the Basic plan pending deals limit. Now it’s 10, it was 5 before.
Tom Martin
on 22 Oct 08Thank you so much for the new “Deals” feature!!
Rajarajan
on 22 Oct 08Thank u so much. Now i can get everything together with lot of ease.
Paul
on 22 Oct 08Sadly that’s still not enough for me, but oh well :( I guess I can live without the deals functionality. At least you implemented it fairly well! Thanks
Richard Allum
on 22 Oct 08Really good to see HR moved in this direction. Personally, I was hoping for a bit more functionality and am a bit disappointed by what Deals can do. It would not be fair to aim this disappointment at 37S as they have not done anything to raise my expectations. I was hoping that Deals would allow me to bin salesforce.com for one company and pipeline deals for another.
Having thought about it a bit over the last 24 hours I have realised that I do not really need much of the functions I use in those other systems. However, there are some things that would really make a huge difference to the effectiveness of Deals (in my opinion):
1. Deals attached to a contact should also show in the company screen (e.g. I have set up a deal for each of three contacts at the same company but when I look at the company screen it has no deal showing). The fact that a deal has been added to a contact within a company also does not show on the company dashboard even though it shows on the contact dashboard. 2. An expected close date would be really useful for me. I need to see what we can expect to close over certain periods (ideally month by month) and having an expected close date field which we could then filter by would do the trick. I am currently using categories to achieve this (e.g Oct 08, Nov 08) as this allows me to filter by month. 3. Order of deals on deals page – this is currently alphabetical by deal name. Would be much better for me if it could be by contact, company, due date (see above) etc. 4. Status options. Currently have pending, won and lost. We have lots of deals that have been agreed but not yet won (i.e. completed) and it would be good to have another status along the lines of In Progress. 5. Add tags.
I really don’t want this to come over as a gripe as it is not meant to be. I have been waiting for this kind of functionality for some time and would love to bin the other systems I use (incidentally I use HR for both companies using salesforce and pipelinedeals). Hope that deals can incorporate some of the above and be a magnificent addition.
Nic Eldridge
on 22 Oct 08Thanks for doubling the amount of deals on the basic plan. This will give us enough to trial and see if it is worth upgrading for.
To be frank, we were in the process of reviewing our need for HR because, while Deals is a nice addition to the product, the lack of duplicate contact management is a very big problem for us.
Andy Henson
on 23 Oct 08I think the new deals functionality could be really useful but for us on the basic plan, the 10 deals still feels a bit miserly. I put on my outstanding deals and immediately hit the (then) 5 limit before the others could try it out. But there really is no need for us to upgrade to the plus plan. We only have 4 people in the company and have been using Highrise almost since it was released and we still only have about 500 contacts with 65mb of filespace used. Having SSL would be nice but that’s not worth an extra $300 per year.
I think that even only allowing 30 would be more than adequate (both for cases and deals) and then those numbers would be more comparable to the other jumps in feature size, e.g. 500 -> 5000 contacts or 20,000 => 5,000. Though I wouldn’t be adverse to having unlimited/4 deals and cases! :)
Tom Martin
on 23 Oct 08Jason -
One necessary refinement – when you track the history of deals on the dashboard it is difficult to distinguish some deals from others.
For example, a common deal I have is called a “XYZ Package.” Many clients get an XYZ Package. So when it comes up on the dashboard or on the tasks page, they all read XYZ package and you can’t tell which is related to which client. (For instance, I have several identical looking tasks to set up a meeting for several identical looking XYZ packages.)
Yes, you could hover over the contact card icon on the tasks page, but that is inconvenient, not useful and isn’t an option on the dashboard.
However, when you click on the XYZ Package link, it takes you to the page for that deal and it reads: “John Doe: XYZ Package.”
Could you please refine the title for the deal so that when it appears on the dashboard and the tasks page, it reads: “John Doe: XYZ Package.”
This would make it much easier to keep a heads up as to what the tasks are and what has happened on the dashboard as to what client. And, that’s the way it should be, right? Thanks.
Chris Patton
on 24 Oct 08First – thanks for bumping up the deals in the basic from 5-10.
I’d still like to make a case for bumping that # up dramatically. The fact that at first your plans had the same # of deals and cases makes me think you consider them to be very similar.
I’d argue that for many (MANY) of your clients they aren’t. I can see how a design shop may only have a few proposals at a time. I run a growing company with, unfortunately, a couple of months sales cycle. So a lot of pending stuff.
So this would be a great feature for us…...if I had many many more deals. I understand the argument ‘just upgrade’ – but then the rest of the account features would be grossly out of whack with what we need.
I guess my main question/point is – why limit them at all? Does it really cost you (much) more to give me unlimited deals? (or a whole bunch – 25% of total contacts for example)
Would bumping that up draw a lot more people from the free to the $12/month?
Jacek
on 26 Oct 08I agree with Richard on deal ordering on the main Deals page – ‘by deal name’ isn’t very practical, wouldn’t it be better to order it by clients? And not only order – it would be great if the deals were segmented by clients as well (and not only by won/lost), so I can quickly see how much money I made on deals with this particular client. As for now, this is a deal-breaker (pun intended) for me.
A fantastic addition, at least for me, would be an option to enter costs for deals and track how much money I really made on each one.
It would also be great to have the ability to add my own currency (it’s PLN in my case) for the deals, but I think I can live without it (it’s still uncomfortable, though).
Anyway, thanks for the new functionality, it seems it has great potential.
Ranvir Gujral
on 27 Oct 08Agree with the general consensus here: the number of deals just doesn’t get me there. We have three people who do all of the selling at our company and we’re looking at salesforce.com for $300 ($99 per person) for the whole year. I happen to not like salesforce and would really like to handle all of our pipeline info on Highrise (been waiting for this feature for a long time, so thanks for that at least) but to upgrade to a $600/yr plan only to track deals isn’t something I can justify.
We’ll continue on the $12 plan for the time being. We use zero cases but have 20, 30, or even 40 leads at various stages that we’d like to track at any given time. I just don’t get the pricing. Part of me wishes you hadn’t released it at all because the pricing makes me feel like I’m getting ripped off. To idea of paying nearly $300/yr for a software application and still not getting enough of the single feature that I find most useful is frustrating, to say the least.
This discussion is closed.