Online business and CRM
Filed under: Marketing by Sasha on September 18, 2007
Doing business online creates many opportunities to make money online but it also creates many different contacts with various people, companies or organizations. It is surely good to be connected all over the Internet but it also means that you need to keep track of all of those contacts. Since we live in a digital world where everything including business is done with the help of a computer the best way to keep all your contacts in one place is to use some kind of CRM software.
Before using CRM software you should be familiar with the concept of CRM or the customer relationship management. Let’s see what has wikipedia to say about CRM concept:
“Customer relationship management (CRM) is a broad term that covers concepts used by companies to manage their relationships with customers, including the capture, storage and analysis of customer, vendor, partner, and internal process information.”
What this means in lay man words is that CRM concepts brings more sales which after all means more money to you and your company by producing what your customers need and by taking notes about what they have to say about your companies reputation and the reputation of your products.
Another phrase that will certainly come up when researching customer relationship management is: lead management. Lead management is described as:
“One key objective of the Marketing function is to generate sales related leads, which finally get converted into Sales Revenues for the company. Marketing campaigns with the specific objective of generating leads (Prospective customers who may be interested in a product). Lead management deals with processing these Leads, carrying out a sanity check, evaluating the genuineness of the information (Since, there is a lot of information that is gathered during Marketing Campaigns it becomes necessary to screen these leads), and finally converting them to Hot Leads or Cold Leads.”
I order to implement CRM strategy your business needs to use some kind of CRM software. There are some open source (free) solutions but there are also customized applications that can be as custom as you want them but that of coarse means you need to spend some money.
The best open source solution that I have found is sugar CRM which is free and paid, you should check it out.
One of the best commercial software that I have tried is AIMpromote which is an on-demand web-based software application to manage the handling of sales leads. It has 14 day free trial with full features available. I have installed it myself, it looks pretty good but I don’t have enough time to do full time (8 hours per day) tests.
