Business Marketing and Technology

Do you use CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software?  If not, you could be fighting an uphill battle.  There are so many things a good CRM can do for your business that it’s almost detrimental to pass it up. 

Many small businesses will admit to having “that spreadsheet with some of their clients’ contact info or order history,” but this is not a scalable, reliable, or useful system compared to what’s available.  A good CRM software will be customizable to your sales process (or focused on your niche, like auto sales or medical office) and help facilitate the organization and flow of your business processes. 

Here are some of the things a good CRM software will do for you:

• Manage your business contacts (leads, clients, vendors, etc.)
• Maintain an order and fulfillment history attached to each client
• Track job flow (order - processing - set up - delivery - payment)
• Organize your products and services
• Assign sales leads to reps track progress
• Reporting and analysis of more angles than you care to know

If you run an accounting software like QuickBooks, you should also be able to get a plug-in to connect them to save you from having to double-enter all of your information and even automatically create invoices.

There are a few big players in the generic CRM market like Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics, but these can be expensive to implement, although they are well supported and relatively flexible and customizable.  These programs are intended for Enterprise-scale use, and are built to be expensive, customizable, and powerful.

 There are also discount CRM’s like Zoho which are quite a value compared to the previous group.  Since the support and huge user base isn’t there, you can expect it to be more rigid but still get the job done if you can work with the mold.

Finally, my favorite category: Open Source CRMs!  These powerful, community developed and supported programs utilize most of the same features and functionality as the big dogs, but are completely free to use and customize for your business.  Vtiger and SugarCRM are the most popular open source CRM, and we personally use vtiger here at Vanivo. 

I recommend looking into CRMs for your business, as it can help you rethink your business processes in an entirely new and efficient way.

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Tony Kau is co-founder of Portland web design and Internet marketing company Vanivo.  For service inquiries, you can contact him directly at tony -at- vanivo.com.

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Tony Kau business, crm, software