Keeping track of what you are doing with each customer can really be a very difficult task. Often made more difficult by the fact that when you are no longer working in an office environment many of the things such as CRM software and other such applications which you may have been use to using are not as easily available.
This is for the most part due to a lack of need, or what the large companies that offer this applications see as a perceived need. Companies of all sizes be they one person or 1,000 employee’s all have the potential need for CRM software. However not all companies have the ability to afford the same sort of software that is available to these large companies.
This is where the potential to use a hosted solution has good potential to save money, while also making it much easier for you to access the software from where ever you may be working. One possible option is the offering from SugarCRM offers a range of different solutions, that start from about $40/user/month. So for a one person business your expense to manage your customer data, could start from just $40, and is easily expandable to include more users as you need.
With software of this calibre available as such an affordable monthly price the idea of trying to keep trak of your customer information, and sales process information in books, or files is almost unimaginable. The amount of extra time your spend looking for, and recording this information would i imagine almost easily pay for the cost of CRM software, as mentioned above.
Great article! A good online CRM can be at tremendous boost to sales with minimal investment.
we searched and tested a lot (web-)solutions with crm-features. we now use batchbook http://www.batchblue.com/ .
their “supertag”-system and simple logging of conversations is easy to use and effective enough for our work. as always: there could be some features that would make it perfect…
Thank-you for the comment Frank. I think that the case with almost any software package or web solution is that there are some feature that are missing or could be added. But there will always be one that does just enough for you to be able to work it in to your work flow.