For starters, whether or not to use a contact software tool is a big question. Unlike mature businesses, they want to get an affordable and cost-effective solution that could allow them to manage customers and business contacts. The truth is that conventional contact management tools might help them, but only to a certain extent. Such tools are great to centralize and manage business contacts; however, they are not so good for managing CRM and sales needs. And mature businesses know about it. In order to be successful, each small company needs a complete CRM solution.
Conventional Standalone Contact Software
Conventional contact management software provides a standalone solution for individuals to create an electronic database of clients and business contacts. First, it has been known as a simple way to combine, streamline, and share customer information. Since companies have developed and their business needs have rapidly grown, traditional contact software has greatly expanded in scope. Nowadays, it lets businesses record, store and track interactions with customers, clients and suppliers. Emails, sales-related documents, calendars, phones, faxes, jobs, etc. All typical contact information is easy to create and manage.
Key Advantage
Although it doesn't provide the full capabilities of small business CRM software, a standalone contact manager system allows you to efficiently manage relationships and interactions with customers and vendors. The key advantage is that your business controls and tracks all this critical information in a single centralized format. You don't have to use different proprietary applications, each with its own data collection scheme.
Besides, you gain these advantages:
- Reduced costs
- Improved prospecting and marketing
- Cross-selling
Small Business CRM Software
However, the capabilities of traditional standalone contact software applications are insufficient when your company needs to manage customer relationships, sales and business contacts. While such applications are oriented more toward managing contact information only, small business CRM software gives you a complete set of tools to manage the entire sales pipeline. Lead generation, opportunity management, quoting, sales tracking, accounting, customer service, etc. All stages and steps of the sales process are managed with a single, integrated platform, rather than a standalone contact management software solution that provides just a small portion of the CRM capabilities.
Successful small businesses have already come to an understanding that they can boost productivity and lower costs by using complete CRM software solutions. That's why the previous method of using Microsoft Outlook or similar tools with a simplified database scheme has become largely obsolete. Today companies want to make customer relationship management as efficient as possible, by providing superb customer support, managing business contacts, generating more leads, and tracking sales.
Improved CRM Platform for Business
Today we can observe the new trend - CRM process gets revolutionized as much as more and more companies change the way they conduct their business and provide customer service. The new look at customer relationships makes software developers change their products as well. Simple and conventional tools don't work anymore. Today developers provide sophisticated, enterprise-wide CRM packages to automate and optimize an organization's contact management activities, sales and resources.
For example: CentriQS, one of the leading desktop solutions for business, has replaced many limited contact manager software tools with a new, complete platform for CRM and sales management. Companies choose this on-premise application because it helps them get what they want. CentriQS centralizes, streamlines and shares business information to let everyone in your organization to access sales and CRM records in one database. This software ensures more productive tracking, sharing, and analysis of customer accounts and sales information. And everything is managed without tedious manual processes and administrative hassles.
Cost-Effectiveness by Powerful Customization
With CentriQS small business CRM solution, you don't have to purchase standalone contact software or spend extra money on special hardware to run it. It is simple in installation and administration, so your IT personnel will never likely have headache of maintaining and upgrading. And it is as cost-effective as customizable.
|
In CentriQS, customization is affordable and easy. You can customize the default database to your business's specific needs and your own preferences, without getting much into the IT business yourself. No coding or special programming skill required. You can tailor the database with just mouse clicks, by adding new entities, tables, workflows, properties, and more. And even if you feel you need more CRM options or integrate CentriQS with other existing systems, your IT personnel can use CentriQS API to create a single integrated software environment in your company. |
|