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CRM Solutions

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Factors to consider when choosing one of the many CRM Solutions.

Those days is difficult find the best CRM solution from the huge number of CRM solutions available on market. Companies has to search for cheaper solutions because they always has to reduce the costs. Price is one of the biggest constrains especially on the recession times. But quality remains important, because acquiring a wrong CRM solution could result in disastrous results on long term.

Paying for a custom solution might be really expensive. The best way to get good quality for less money is to buy an existing products which can be customized for your company needs. One of the best options is to pay a CRM consultant to select the one which is the most appropriate to your business. But there is enough information on the web which might drive you to take the best decision if the budget does not allow paying a consultant.

What is CRM

Definition

CRM stands for Customer Relationsship Management. The primary goal of CRM is to manage the company contact with its clients. The goal of any CRM solution is to collect, organize analyze the customer data and to make it accessible to the employees for improving the ways in which the organization interact with its clients.

CRM Definition

Initially CRM was generally limited to contact management: monitoring and recording interactions and communications with customers. Then, CRM Software solutions expanded and embraced deal tracking and the management of accounts, territories, opportunities, and-at the managerial level-the sales pipeline itself.

Types of CRM Solutions

There are several options when you're opting for a CRM solution. One of the most important is the price, of course. Depending on the budget you can opt for:

Solution implemented for your business - Hire a specialized company to build from scratch a solution created just for your business. This is the most expensive way, not only for having a solution but also for maintaining it so just a few can afford it.

Customized CRM software - Many companies are selling CRM solutions which need just to be customized for specific businesses. Not often the small customizing solutions companies are customizing software sold by bigger companies.

Ready to Run CRM software products - in order to lower the cost of the software they sell many companies transformed their solutions in ready to run CRM software products. All you need is to buy install and then use a specific program. No more customization, with the benefit of a lower cost and the disadvantage of o generic software for a specific business.

Free CRM Solutions - Those days there are many open source CRM solutions. Some of them are free to copy, modify and distribute. When opting for such a solution you have to analyze the cost of customizing and maintaining it.

Online CRM solutions - this is a new wave, of small online solutions, targeted for small businesses. Those solutions are ready to work and you need only an internet connection. The entire solution is in most of the cases just a web site. When you opt for such a solution you get a login account based on which you can access your data. Those solutions consist in a recurring fee, which varies based on the size of the business and the number of users having access to the online account. Unlike the traditional CRM solutions, all the data is not stored by the client so clients are skeptical to buy such solutions.

Factors to consider when choosing a CRM Solution

Your business model - there are specialized CRM software vendors for different business segments. The first step is to make a list of CRM solutions vendors including vendors specialized in specific market segments as well as vendors offering generic solutions.
Organizations requirements - the next step is to identify the requirements. Those requirements have to be compared to the features offered different CRM solutions in order to select the most appropriate one.

Reviews of existing solutions - it's important to gather reviews of the existing solutions. This can be done searching and reading on internet specialized sites and by contacting partners, clients and providers who already have similar solutions implemented.

Cost: - Once the initial list of the potential providers was narrowed the last factor which comes into pictures is the price. Several aspects needs to be considered when the price is evaluated:
- Acquisition price - of course this is the most visible aspect of the business. A small acquisition price does not guarantee a good total cost.
- Maintenance costs - this will come as a recurring charge to the company providing maintenance services or to there might be hidden costs associated the software.
- Customization costs - there are many applications offered by different software vendors which need to be customization to be put in place. In many cases the customization services are done by third parties service providers.
- Integration costs - in many cases CRM applications need to be integrated with other applications used in an organization. The costs of integrations need to be evaluated as well as the ease of a potential future integration with new applications at a later stage.
- Hardware and 3rd parties software is an aspect which should not be neglected. Many CRM software solutions requires powerful computers and expensive licenses(database licenses, server licenses,...)

Open Source CRM Solutions

There are many open source solutions that can be customized. Most of them are also free to use and to redistribute:

Sugar CRM: Probably the best known open source CRM software, written in PHP and using an MySQL database. Sugar CRM was started back in 2004 and currently it is used by more that 12000 companies. Some of the companies using Sugar CRM are: Honeywell, Yahoo, Starbucks, State of Oregon, NASA Ames Research, AXA Rosenberg, First Federal Bank, and BDO Seidman.
SplendidCRM: SplendidCRM is a project started in 2005. It is built in c# and requires and Microsoft SQL Server and IIS server. Splendid CRM has a an open source free version and a professional version which include an outlook integration modules and other features which are missing from the free version.
InfusionSoft CRM: InfusionSoft CRM is a commercial software product targeted to small business providing all-in-one crm modules: sales force management, autoresponders, shopping carts, order forms, multiple users, affiliate programs...

A cheap contact manager CRM that is easy to use. $ more...0 points

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alexakelly Feb 22, 2012 @ 3:45 am | delete

With the help of CRM software, we can get instant access to your organization's critical customer information. It also increases internal efficiency by automating workflow process, reducing human error and process time and providing consistency throughout the entire organization.

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RichardMillner Oct 31, 2011 @ 3:30 pm | delete

great lens and information..

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rzn8media Mar 7, 2011 @ 2:38 pm | delete

Basic but solid information on CRM Software

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rzn8media Mar 7, 2011 @ 2:41 pm | delete

For a more in-depth understanding of CRM software checkout /www.designr1.com/crm-software/">CRM Software sorry for the plug in advance but worth it to look.

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laef Feb 25, 2011 @ 4:56 am | delete

What I love in crm systems is that we can automate every thing in our business like sales, marketing, customer management, communications, follow-up, internal workflow, billing, collections, and everything in between. Once we put our business on autopilot we are in a position to grow faster and invest the extra time into our business, family, or community.

Laef
Infusionsoft CRM