Looking for a CRM for non-sales use?

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I'm looking or a CRM, but not for traditional sales-related tasks. My field is in publishing, where we need to keep track of incoming submissions, consultants, pieces under review and editing, among other things.

I've been looking at CRMs and Project Management systems to see which is the best for our use, but the field is quite large, unfortunately. I have only some understanding of Salesforce and HubSpot at a very high level of what they accomplish, but my fear is that they are too tailored towards sales and financials, and may not be the best fit for a project centered around getting pieces published.

Some requirements:

  • It would be nice to have some way to keep track of contacts/consultants, along with notes for each one, and possibly tags.
  • Creating tasks with workflows, and checklists, would be a great benefit for keeping track of each publication under review.
  • Document storage integration, with Sharepoint most ideally, would also be a huge win for us.
  • A system with robust permission schemes is also important. Some members need to see more documents or issues/tasks than others.

It's hard finding systems tailor-made to this kind of environment, and so we're looking at project management systems or CRMs that can be modified to suit our needs. Our current solution is basically shared folders in cloud drives, which is unwieldy and prone to user error. I've looked at some systems like Salesforce or HubSpot, but I am unsure how well-modified these can be to keep the underlying generic system while removing most mentions of sales-related items. These powerful CRMs have a great system powering them which I feel can be applied to more tasks for other workflows, but finding which ones can be extended in such ways is difficult to find on the internet.

Based on the sparse list above, and your own experience, does anyone have some good ideas? Any feedback would be appreciated!

submitted by /u/Jman012
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