Customer relationship management is a foreign term to many small businesses. Most would be unlikely to use anything more complicated than Microsoft Outlook to manage their customers, suppliers and partners.
In the past CRM has been an expensive software purchase that required a dedicated server, expensive integration with email and other applications - in short, it fell in the too-hard basket.
Cloud computing has changed that. After its founding in 1999 by ex-Oracle engineers, Salesforce has rapidly risen to become the third most popular CRM product in the world, sitting just behind giants Oracle and SAP.
Leads, accounts, contacts and opportunities are all tabbed along one dashboard.
In the centre of the main page are dashboards that show how a sales person is doing with their quota, their biggest deals and the sales pipeline.
The program integrates with Microsoft Office, Lotus Notes and Google Apps (although a third-party plugin is needed to work with Office 2010 - a sticking point for some). Prices start at US$5 a user a month for a basic contact manager which tracks customer interactions and co-ordinates tasks and reminders.
For $25 a month a business can capture leads from its web site, track sales opportunities and Google AdWords performance, and get access to the CRM's pre-built dashboards and reports. The price also includes 12x5 phone support.
Salesforce's success has spawned many imitators. Sage, Microsoft, Sugar and Oracle have released their own software-as-a-service (SaaS) versions and there are a host of new CRM players with no history in on-premise software.
While margins on SaaS services are not particularly rewarding, the services involved in migration and integration can be. And introducing SMBs to the benefits of sales automation creates goodwill and could open the door to a unified communications sale.
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