Business CRM Solutions

Posted on September 27, 2011 by maplespeaker

Effective business CRM solutions must fulfil the evolving demands of big and small companies. The CRM product should meet all your industry specific needs. When business is involved, there needs to be a specific software to keep track of all your business functions. So that, as and when business grows, the business functions could run smoothly and things are all in track.

Business CRM solutions should include:-

Sales and Sales Force Automation: This helps in lead generation and getting through the sales funnel from start till the leads are converted or moved to dead state. The automation will help in the complete sales life cycle and focus on the needs of the customer and your business.

Customer Support: Automates support tasks to improve efficiency and customer satisfaction. It maintains all the records and histories of the customer so that your business provides a better and quick service to them.

Marketing: It captures opportunities and customer contact data to improve the quality of your campaigns. This could involve work related to marketing techniques that helps in identifying the leads and categorizing them so as to target them easily.

Work Management: Manage, track and maintain a grip on all departments. Empower teams to deliver within targets and effectively measure results.

Strategic Planning: CRM allows you to generate various kinds of reports which helps in understanding the business flow. Thus providing a tool to analyse how the business is functioning so as to take necessary steps in improving or changing the plans.

CRM gives business users a platform to perform business functions and analyse every level of the functionality. With SaaS applications, users can have an access to CRM at any time and have information which are up-to-date. You can optimize performance, decision making and allocate work to resources from your CRM solution.

Business CRM solutions optimize a company’s ability to utilize customer data to increase sales, reduce cost, retain customers and increase productivity.

For more articles on CRM, visit http://maplecrm.com/crm_ articles.php

Saas CRM Solution

Posted on September 23, 2011 by maplespeaker

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) refers to software that is accessed via a web browser and is paid on a subscription basis i.e. monthly or yearly. SaaS is one of the fastest growing concept of the present business market.

SaaS is considered as faster and a cost effective for business as it doesn’t include hardware, implementation or acquisition costs. The complete responsibility of software maintenance would be of SaaS vendors. Since customers pay a subscription, they have immediate access to the new features and functionality. Unlike traditional softwares where upgrades would happen once in a year or once in 6 months.

SaaS applications are usually referred as Hosted CRM, Web based CRM or Online CRM. SaaS based CRM is a better choice compared to the traditional Onpremise CRM as you don’t have to invest huge amount while installing it and also you have the whole CRM system set up for use very quickly.

Benefits of using SaaS:

You do not need a full fledged IT department who can maintain the software updates and issues.
You would not need to define your software requirements, instead choose what all you need from the features offered by CRM vendor. Also, it is easy to upgrade your package and add more features whenever required.
Access to software anytime and from anywhere.
You can concentrate on your core business rather than handling IT issues of software.

Maple offers SaaS CRM application for small to medium organizations. For more details, visit http://maplecrm.com

CRM Software for Small Enterprises

Posted on September 20, 2011 by maplespeaker

You may often keep thinking whether you really need a CRM software when you are running a small business. Small Business is where the Sales, Marketing and Customer Service requires more importance. You cannot afford loosing a business here. So you would need to concentrate more and put the right strategy to get more customers as well as maintain the existing ones. This would definitely need a system where everything can be maintained and tracked rather than manually doing it.

One thing a small business owner knows is that most customer relationship management (CRM) systems and solutions go well over their heads and budgets. For the most part, CRM software has been an enterprise application -the kind of solution that requires a dedicated team to develop custom CRM modules to fit the business, another team to analyze the resulting data and reports, plus an IT staff to handle costly upgrades and deployment. The difference between an enterprise CRM and small business CRM software is not only the IT requirements, pricing, the tools and features of the application, but also amount of data that is handled by the system.

CRM software is not a big company application. It is a necessity when it comes to managing sales activities and customer service. Let’s say your business is slow and you need a pickup, if you are utilizing a CRM Software, you can look into your database and see who are the most likely prospects to buy again. Say you were offering products and one of the lead liked it but the price was little out of her range. Given that it was good business time that you were having and you had no reason to drop the price but you had noted it down in your CRM software and forgot about it. Now when you actually need business and you are okay to reduce the price, you go to your database and search for such possible leads and find this prospect and appropriate notes that were added. You contact this lead and make the offer and you may get the deal. You can also send promotional emails for such interested leads and get the deal using a CRM software.

That is just one example of how valuable a CRM Software system can be for your small business. Your database and your customer list are the most important things to your business. Stay in touch with customers periodically and they will remember you and recommend you. Definitely, small businesses need CRM Software as much as the big enterprises!

With SaaS (Software as a Service) model, CRM applications have been able to serve small and medium sized organizations in much more flexible way enabling cost effective and fastest way of using CRM for businesses. The other option of CRM software for small businesses is to have OnPremise CRM where the software will be installed in the company’s location and IT employees are responsible for installing all hardware and software components and integrating it with existing systems. This is considered to be expensive and not a good option for small businesses as this involves costly initial investments and having people working on the software for maintenance and upgrades. This could be eliminated with Cloud based or Online CRM software (Saas) where hosting service provider or the CRM vendor takes care of this whole process and the pricing would be based on monthly or yearly payment.

Having a CRM software system for business allows companies to improve employee productivity, shorten sales cycles and increase revenue, while cutting sales and marketing related expenses.

Software as a Service

Posted on September 14, 2011 by maplespeaker

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is one of the fastest growing concept of the present business market. SaaS refers to software that is accessed via a web browser and is paid on a subscription basis i.e. monthly or yearly.