Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
The Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is where to store all your clients, prospects, leads, sales opportunities, and all interactions with them. Some CRMs are wider in scope and also give you a customer portal, support ticketing system, project management, invoicing capabilities, and other related functions, which can be great for small companies to have it all in one place.
We implement and support three web-based CRM system: Salesforce.com, SugarCRM and vTiger, ranging from moderately expensive to free.
Salesforce.com
A solid and complete system in terms of sales force automation, including accounts and contacts, marketing and leads, opportunities and quotes, analytics and forecasting, process manager, email and productivity, content library for document management. It also has a very good market place for add-on applications called AppExchange where you can find just about anything you need, with more or less plug-and-play installation into the overall CRM. It is all hosted in the cloud at Salesforce and the most expensive CRM we recommend, although really affordable and flexible if you compare to other commercial CRM applications.
SugarCRM
SugarCRM is another popular web-based CRM system, but although they call themselves open source it is only a limited version called Community Edition which you can install for free on your own server. Most non-basic CRM users need Professional or Enterprise priced approximately half that of its Salesforce.com equivalents. They also have their own SugarExchange Apps if you need add-on functionality.
vTiger
vTiger is developed in India based on SugarCRM's open source core and then a lot of extensions and extra functionality have been added on top of it. It is not quite as solid as the others, but with some experience (like we have), tips and tricks and a good server you can set up your own CRM system for free! For small companies this option is very attractive since it has no license costs and it is also fairly complete with functionality. For Marketing and Sales it supports campaigns, accounts, contacts, leads, potentials/opportunities. For Support you can set up a customer portal, ticketing system and FAQ/Knowledge Management repository. It also helps you set up for products, services and price books with the ability to create sales orders, quotations and invoices. Some of the useful extensions you can add are a project management module.
The most important thing with having a CRM system is that it works for your organization so that it gets used, and you need someone to bounce questions to and someone that can configure the system they way you like it, maybe even outsource data entry and help set up and run campaigns. This is exactly what Ztrive does.