What is a "CRM"

A CRM is a "Customer Relationship Manager". It refers to any software that helps a business stay in touch with their client base, and any new leads that need chasing.

CRM software is a difficult solution for small businesses, especially if the workforce is often on the move, and office-based sales support staff thin on the ground. Most CRM packages fit into one of two categories: Ones that were originally designed for a single user and have been scaled up, and those that has been designed for very large organisations and scaled down.

Scaling up from a single user

Many small business that start with a single member of staff will have an address book that lives on one computer and may be synchronised via a cable to that persons phone. Or they may have bought a single user copy of one of the better known packages such as ACT or Goldmine.

Once the business grows past a single person, the problems of scaling start to show up. A single address book located on one person's computer no longer works as both the software and the network need to be able to share access, and not all software will allow this. Programs like ACT and Goldmine can be set to share data, but only if the computers have a common area in which to save the data, like a file server. This means usually means that the software can only be used in the office. There are many workarounds, but that is what they are, a patchwork of possible solution.

So stepping up from a single person solution can be considerably more expensive than you would expect.

Scaling down from an enterprise solution

CRM software designed for enterprise sided companies has often been designed with one particular company in mind, in effect their first client. Over the years different enterprise sized businesses have asked for different methodologies, and what you can end up with is a very clever and complex solution, with many features a small business will never use, at a price that small business cannot usually afford

A number of enterprise solutions are web based, because it cuts down on the amount of work needed to maintain the software. If your IT staff do not have to visit 4000 workstations every time there is a software update, everything can get done a lot quicker.

Web based solutions also have the advantage that instead of trying to synchronise your data with every brand and model of PDA and mobile phone, you can use the web to access the data from anywhere in the world.

So what now?

Forget About IT has been researching two web based solutions, both of which have an open source version, both of which have been tested on our Forget About IT servers. SugarCRM is probably the better know, and the other is vTiger CRM, which was originally based on the open source version of Sugar CRM. We prefer vTiger as it seems to integrate better with our systems, and more importantly, the plug-in's for Office, Outlook, Firefox and Thunderbird are all Open Source as well.

We have also found vTiger to be less confusion than SugarCRM, although this is a personal opinion based on two particular versions of the software.