Step one:  basic email

You need email when:  you are trying to do business in the 21st century, and your market is not using Twitter for absolutely all of their communication.

Use a basic email application, such as MS Outlook or GMail, set up to send email from the domain name under which you do business.  Use the “categories” option to identify subgroups of your contact file, such as Clients, Prospects, Suspects, Friends, Health, and so forth.

Consider using the Notes field to record useful information about the contact.

Advantage:  Simple, omnipresent, good interfaces with other systems (phone, social networking)

Limitation:  Does not provide “double opt-in” verification for subscription mailings, and does not provide “unsubscribe” options.  People have to contact you personally to ask you not to send additional emails, and many people are too polite to do this.  So they set up rules to send your email to the trash, or quietly resent you every time you send another unwanted email.

Drawback:  Difficult to track when you last contacted a client or prospect, if that contact was in a form other than email.

Step 2:  Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

CRM systems organize, automate, and synchronize sales and marketing activities, providing a way to collect information about a customer across many areas of a company’s interaction with a client or prospect.

You need CRM when: your business operates on sales to people in you interact with personally, and more than one person in your business may be interacting with your customers.

You may not need CRM if: your sales happen without direct intervention, such as through online sales of downloadable information products, OR you are the only person interacting with your clients.

Advantage: All your customer information, including history and plans, in one place.  Documentation of your selling system.

Drawback:  Many solopreneurs find that home-grown systems using a extracted contact list from their email and/or social networking sites can provide all the functionality they really need.  If you have access to shared storage space on the internet (Wave, wikis), it can be possible for a remote assistant to use a spreadsheet-based tool.  Given how many people will be happy to tell you how many CRM systems they have used, one might conclude that no-one’s completely happy with any specific system.

Step 3:  Email Marketing systems

Email marketing systems allow you to create permission-based email newsletters, surveys, e-courses, and autoresponders.  While you can do some of these functions with your personal/business email account, and others with a CRM system, it is the email marketing programs that study and optimize deliverability.  They work with ISPs to help your messages get through.  They also provide campaign tracking and can tell you how many people opened your email, and which links were clicked.

You need Email Marketing when: your business operates on the internet, with little in-person contact with individuals, or when your website is a significant lead generation source and email marketing is a component of your overall marketing strategy.

You may not need Email marketing when: your business operates exclusively in the brick-and-mortar world and your clients are not used to receiving marketing materials by email.

Advantage: professional Email Marketing applications provide either single or double opt-in (sending a confirmation email) and easy unsubscribe options, allowing you to stay clear of violating the CAN-SPAM law.  They also provide stock templates for your newsletter and a lot of email marketing education.

Drawback:  They’re not free.  OTOH, this is an area where “free,” in the form of home-grown, may be very expensive, should you inadvertently be caught sending what the law, or an unhappy recipient, has defined as spam. Join the forum discussion on this post

CRM, an abbreviation of Customer relationship management software is a tool used to manage all of your contacts’ and customers’ information in one place and tracks all activities related to them. It’s also used to manage partner and vendor relationships. It stores critical data for sales, marketing, and customer service purposes and is used for managing marketing campaigns and generating meaningful reports. With CRM software like Microsoft Dynamics CRM, it’s easy to share customer information, monitor sales activities and retrieve purchase history, identify revenue opportunities, deliver consistent customer service, and track your progress against your goals.

Do I Need It?

It’s important to analyze your needs before selecting a CRM software. Here are some indicators that your company may be ready to take the plunge:

• You use multiple methods to communicate with your customers (e-mail, phone, face-to-face, direct mail, etc.)
• You want to be able to target specific customers and prospects and personalize communications
• Your customers’ demographics vary.
• You want greater visibility into your sales or order pipeline.
• You’re duplicating efforts within the company (i.e. two salespeople call the same prospect)
• It’s time-consuming and difficult to generate reports
• You want to be able to track marketing and sales trends and identify opportunities.
• Any customer or prospect data you currently have is spread across different software

Is It Worth the Investment?

It´s a fair question; many business leaders still question the value of implementing CRM software in a business.  There are several tangible and intangible benefits to CRM including increased revenue, reduced costs, and greater efficiency. Of course, these results vary depending on the company and type of CRM software you choose. However, it’s easier to prove the worth of a CRM software investment compared to many other software systems since some benefits can be realized almost immediately.

Some benefits include:

• Increased sales due to the ability to automate and directly communicate with your customers with tracking.
• Integration with existing databases and technology systems
• Consolidated information in a centralized system
• Improved visibility into company data and processes for more predictable and manageable business operations
• Ability to create custom reports efficiently and modify rules of the system
• Improved customer service and efficiency due to increased responsiveness and non-duplication of data
• Improved information sharing and synchronization resulting in increased productivity and sales performance.
• Better targeted and more efficient marketing

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SugarCRM Advantages
Sugar Suite is an excellent choice due to its advanced features, and is convenient to organizations from all sizes and industries. The installation of SugarCRM, as well as the installation of additional modules and language packs is quite easy and trouble-free, and the admin area offers a great variety of options and tools. SugarCRM is built on the pure Open Source LAMPS platform: Linux or Windows, Apache or IIS, MySQL, PHP, and SugarCRM. Its mobile solutions translate to less downtime and greater productivity. Sugar Suite integrates e-mail and calendar information with Microsoft Outlook, ensuring that company communications are centralized and coordinated. Due to the Flexible Delivery Model, there are no constraints around deployment. Moreover, the customizable User Interface and Workflow guarantee adaptation to the user, not the other way around. With Sugar Suite Modular Open Applications you will have what you need to connect across your business. The Open Source Architecture provides 100% visible source code for inexpensive customization and support. The Neutral Operation System avoids “forklift” upgrades and propriety vendor lock-in.

SugarCRM Disadvantages
While providing more capabilities and reliability, some users report that Sugar Suite loads slower than vTiger CRM and is not so easy to use.  Although as of recent in version 6.0 the performance is much better.  Problems may also arise if a user doesn’t lock the Installation after finishing it. Contrary to vTiger CRM, some of its add-ons are not free for installing and should be ordered additionally. Another disadvantage of SugarCRM is the very resource-consuming upgrade process. A SugarCRM upgrade can rarely be completed successfully on a shared server because the upgrade times out.

vTiger CRM is an Open Source CRM software appropriate for small and medium organizations. With it you can manage your company wide CRM and Inventory Management activities effectively, including sales force and marketing automation, customer support and service, and procurement. There are many tools and add-ons that will assist you in enhancing your organization’s business productivity. Some of them are MS Outlook, MS Office and Thunderbird integration, Customer Portal, RSS and others. Find more information about vTiger features.

vTiger CRM Advantages
Being extremely easy to use is perhaps one of the most important advantages of vTiger CRM. Compared to Sugar Suite, vTiger CRM loads faster. vTiger’s user interface is more intuitive and easier to use. The necessary software, such as Apache, MySQL, and PHP are integrated, and executables are made available both for Windows and Linux operating systems. The vTiger CRM software provides Open Source add-ons for Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla/Thunderbird, Microsoft Word, and Customer Portal, which add more value to the end-users by providing many enterprise features. The Software is absolutely FREE and does not require any up-front investment. It allows pre-sales and post-sales activities be integrated in a single application and provides rich user-experience with product customization and excellent customer support.

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