Ask HN: A Rapportive-esque Email CRM for small businesses and startups?
As a small startup that sells to enterprises, we've been looking high and low for a collaboration-centric CRM that bridges the gap between the email and CRM silos, yet we've found almost every solution we've tried wanting, and we've tried a handful to say the least.

While we interact with our customers primarily via email, because most commercial CRMs are a completely separate silo, multiple problems arise:

-We have little or no context (about contacts or opportunities) while looking at an email, although we might have added relevant information / notes to the CRM.

-The email inbox and the CRM are eternally out of sync, necessitating a lot of duplicated data entry and resulting in incomplete account / opportunity information.

-The context-switching overhead associated with frequently toggling between email and the CRM.

What we've really been looking for:

1) Activity Feed: A simple, concise stream of updates for each and every account / opportunity, so we're all on the same page and we've recorded the entire history of our interactions with a customer for posterity.

2) Email Bridge: When the CRM is a separate silo, a huge amount of duplicate data entry results. Tight email integration via a Rapportive-esque widget for GMail / Outlook that lets me associate mails with opportunities, and view contextual information within the inbox. This includes email-CRM sync, so that contacts are up to date.

3) Task Management: A basic task manager that integrates with my calendar and email (the ability to create tasks from emails and have them appear in my calendar) .

4) Simple CRM: The ability to create accounts / opportunities and add collaborators.

5) Mobile: A simple mobile web app to access contacts / relevant data when on the move was imperative.

6) Basic Reporting: A concise dashboard that lets me visualize a few key metrics (optional).

What we observed (I'm covering only some of the more famous tools that we tried. I don't mean to criticize these tools, I'm only trying to point out that they did not work for our use-case):

-Sugar CRM, while infinitely malleable and extensible, was never built for collaboration.

-Salesforce: The same might be said of SalesForce - too complicated / clunky, too focused on reporting / analytics, and too expensive for a small team anyway.

-Fat Free CRM was a bit too spartan and ended up being inflexible to the point that we had to discard it.

-Insightly, a CRM that integrates deeply with Google Apps seemed promising at first blush, but we found it far from usable from a collaboration standpoint. Too many clicks needed to get anything done.

-Highrise was simple and well designed, but their email integration was far too convoluted for our liking.

-Zoho CRM seemed to possess most of the features that we were looking for, but the user experience left so much to be desired that we had to walk away.

-While Rapportive and Xobni certainly have their merits (and I'm a big fan), they're too basic and contact-centric to really considered sales CRMs.

So, is there a simple CRM for startups and small businesses that integrates tightly and plays well with email? Is this a pain point that resonates with any other HNers?

NOTES:

1] I'm aware that a)CureCRM and b)Xobni Pro + the SalesForce Gadget are approximate enterprise versions of what we're looking for, but a small startup like ours cann't afford to use SalesForce.

2] Nimble CRM is a new social CRM for Google Apps that looks quite interesting. They try to be your consolidated inbox, and I'm a bit loath to use anything other than good old GMail for email. I will give them a spin, though.