B2B Marketing ROI

I need to make some SEO improvements… finalize ad placements for late 2009… write a blog entry… look, a bright shiny object. Where was I?

I feel like a lot of marketers are like me: they wear a lot of hats and have a lot on their plates. As such, I am eternally looking for ways to stay organized and have tried quite a few recently. Here’s a quick rundown of four tools I considered and the ultimate winner:

Our corporate CRM (salesforce.com): 

I really just need a glorified to-do list, perhaps with simple milestones and reminders. The CRM can easily handle this but it adds quite a bit of complexity to that process as well — definitely overkill for what I needed. 

Simple Project Management Tool (Basecamp by 37Signals): 

This is getting a lot closer but it still feels like a bit of overkill for what I need and doesn’t show up quite right on a mobile device. I do absolutely love Basecamp for group projects though and am an avid user. The folks at 37Signals improve the platform pretty rapidly and make great choices to keep it from being bloated with features that 80% of us do not really need. The have put together an excellent book that explains their product management philosophy and it is a great read for anyone building anything (but particularly a SaaS product). 

To Do List Manager (todoist.com):

I had previously taken a look at the above-mentioned 37Signals’ Tadalist, which was great because of its simplicity and also its pricetag (can’t beat free!). It also looks great on an iPhone. Then I found Todoist, which seems to strike the right balance between simple (and free) and robust. It allows for very easy organization of to-do items, prioritization, sub-items. They have widgets and plug-ins for OS X, iGoogle, Firefox, and Gmail and a pro version allows for proactive notifications of deadlines via basically every medium you could imagine. Todoist also boasts an API allowing you to make your own apps that pull and push data. If they come out with an iphone app (they have a mobile site but it is a bit lacking currently), they will be perfect for me. Again, it’s free and definitely worth a look if you are looking for something to replace the post-it notes on your monitor. 

Todoist: To Do List Manager