CRM for Small Business. How the market started off and where we are now.CRM for Small Business Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems have for a long time been used by large organizations such as Banks, Utilities and some government agencies (Citizen Relationship Management) to help them manage their customer interactions.
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Con't Single person systems such as ACT, Goldmine and a few others have also been around for a while and are a very useful personal productivity tool. However, it has not really been until recently with the divergence of the internet, wireless communications, cheap calls, inexpensive data hotels and online applications that CRM for Small Business has really been an option. Unlike the Banks, Utilities and Government small to medium sized business really did not need their CRM system to integrate into any other applications apart from be able to throw up some reporting for the accounts. Which is where the larger organizations could show huge savings. Small businesses really needed a good system for sales tracking, lead reporting, integration to email in and out and some management reports. On top of that as long as there were lots of fields to hold user information and a bit of a reporting engine everything was OK. The issues were more to do with the nature of sales people and if the business was made up of "partners" how they all worked. All of these people have this nasty habit of wanting to take their pc's off with them, to be connected some of the time and then disconnected at others, but with access to all their info at all times. The issue meant that a small company would have to have quite a large IT infrastructure to achieve this, with quite technically advance software, systems and business processes to keep all that data up to data and clean. There are so many stories of CRM's in Small Business being writhen over, triplicated and generally corrupted by just one press of the wrong button. And obviously the main issue here was the cost in time and labor to keep all this together. Not to mention the fact that most small companies did not have enough work for a full time IT person. Which meant that any jack who knew how to turn on a PC was put in charge of the companies. The enter into the market the Online Applications Service providers. These providers started to use the divergence of online services that had started to become cheaply available just at the end of the tech bust in late 2002. These application providers delivered large company infrastructure and capabilities based on a monthly charge, back to the future to some extent as this is how payroll computing used to be done in the 1970's. One of the first cabs off the rank for small businesses was CRM, lead by one or two companies backed by the large players like Oracle and Sebel. These were quickly followed by a number of other companies who saw the opportunity. This was still late in 2004 and early 2005. What has now come to pass is that these inexpensive CRM applications have now taken on some of the more advanced technical features that were probably only available to companies with many million dollar budgets. Now a small company can pay a small initial cost and a very low monthly fee and receive incredible features, functions and business benefits. A good CRM for Small Business application can now offer at least the following types of capabilities as standard:- - contact management - sales force automation - sales lead pipeline reporting - sales lead distribution - integration of online forms for internet leads - auto responders - voice broadcasts - faxing - fax broadcast - hard copy print management - e-commerce - Online order forms - online merchant account integration - payment plans - shopping carts - online email - appointment bookings - Order reporting - marketing reporting - marketing campaigns - online and offline integrated campaign management - affiliate marketing - affiliate management - work flow management - integration to handhelds - reporting suites All of these features are really just the starting point of a modem online Applications Service Providers CRM for Small Business offering.
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