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Small Business CRM – Fueling Large Scale CRM Growth

In the initial CRM rush of the 90’s, most SMB (small to medium sized businesses) were largely ignored. At that time, CRM was considered to be the forte of large enterprises. But soon, vendors noticed that a huge market was lying untapped in the SMB market. This realization has led to the creation of several high quality small business CRM solution.

A global market analyst by the name of Datamonitor expects the CRM market to spend about $2 billion by 2008. This is almost double of what is being spent today. The largest CRM market is EMEA which is expected to spend close to $600 million on customer relationship management applications.

The applications

When it comes to the small business customer relationship management applications, there is a considerable difference in CRM solutions and enterprise class CRM. But this difference is eliminated by the high quality functionalities that are included within the application at a fraction of the cost. This is one of the reasons why hosted CRM is becoming a global force.

The high capital costs were eliminated and a certain degree of flexibility was introduced into CRM applications.Today most vendors have a host of products for small businesses. Most of these products can be further tailored to meet the individual needs of the customers.

A far more competitive environment

This influx of customer relationship management into the small to medium sized business world has also led to far more precise business models. The overall environment has become far more competitive and healthier.

Revenue generation, customer service and channel management have reached the next level. Its customer focused business models that rule the roost today and it is to the benefit of the customer.

For more info visit : Small Business CRM

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Rama_Krishna

The Top 3 On-Demand CRM Packages

Here are three hot CRM companies and how they fair against one another.

Sales Force ? This is the front-runner for On-Demand (website based) CRM. They cater mostly towards large corporations but recently added a small business version.

Pros: They are one of the most robust CRM packages out there and have good tech support. They offer good mobile support for Blackberry and Palm OS.

Cons: Although they cost around $15/per user per month for the first year, after the first year their cost triples! Their software is so robust that for most small businesses it is confusing and may require extensive training to utilize properly.

LogicBright CRM ? This is the new kid on the block. They show a lot of potential for the SMB market since they are only catering to this market.

Pros: Logic Bright CRM is by far the easiest and least expensive CRM?s out there. Their cost is $20/user per month and extra disk space can be purchased if you wish to use the CRM more as file-sharing software. Since it is easy to use there is little training required.

Cons: Logic Bright CRM is a new product and hasn?t proven itself yet.

Sugar CRM – After coming out a couple of years ago, they have launched an impressive amount of add-ons and changes.

Pros: Lots of customization if you have on staff programmers, everything is open-source. They also have on-site options if you wish to house your own servers. Great for medium to large sized companies.

Cons: Focused too much on larger companies with their pricing ($50/user per month) and their features.

There are plenty of other CRM options on the market. Most are either designed for very small businesses such as ACT! or for large corporations such as Siebal. If you are a business in the 5-10 user range I would recommend trying out Logicbright.com

Josh Collins is a multimedia designer in the Kansas City area. He has designed user interfaces and websites ranging from small business sites to large social network websites. His recent sites include:
Wonder Survey
an online based survey software
Film Crave
a social network for movie lovers

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Josh_Collins

Update on Current CRM Market

The CRM marketplace continues to flourish as more and more companies are waking up to the realization that CRM is imperative to their success.

CRM applications are amongst the fastest growing applications in the market with a growth rate of 10% in 2006 and up to 17% in 2007. The strong overall growth is expected to continue for the next few years. Newer trends are evolving according to the ever changing needs of the marketplace.

However, not all of them are significant enough to have a massive impact on the market. Here we take a look at two recent trends that have made a difference to the working of CRM globally.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

CRM software has taken a new form with software as a service or SaaS. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is growing like a wild fire.

There are several reasons for this sudden spurt in SaaS.

They are easy to use, easy to deploy, have a much lower risk rate when compared to client/server implementations and also have lower upfront costs.

These benefits have not only redefined the rules for the SMB (small to medium sized business) market but also for the large enterprise market.

It has been predicted that the SaaS phenomenon will lead to a 24% growth rate in the coming years.

Top vendors like SAP and Microsoft have announced their SaaS CRM applications in the coming year.

Service Oriented Architecture ( SOA )

CRM vendors have also started to release Service Oriented Architecture or SOA products.

SOA is the new face of CRM and has features like Multi tenancy and combining resources throughout the enterprise.

A lot of applications are bundled into a single suite making it easier for most companies to manage them.

If a new business rule is implied, then it is simultaneously implied across the whole SOA platform.

So you no longer have to keep buying software upgrades every year. You simply buy, use and reuse it again.

There is a prediction that SOA based services will touch $34 billion by the year 2010.

For more info visit : CRM

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Rama_Krishna

Top On-demand CRM Packages For Small Businesses

“Following are some of the top notch web based (on-demand) CRM packages available today, though all of them are proven to be the best but you need to choose the one which matches best with your requirements.

The front runner of web based or on demand CRM is ‘Sales Force’. They basically aim to provide solutions for large corporations but they are also having customized small modules catering to the needs of small businesses as well. The support provided by this company is top class and you can expect full cooperation from the company for customization of software according to your requirements.

Sales Force also provides Blackberry and Palm-OS support. But compare to other CRM packages Sales force is quite expensive. For first three months they offer introductory price once you feel comfortable and like to continue with them they charge the actual rate.

Logic Bright CRM is comparatively a new CRM in the market. They are mainly targeting SMB market and provide top class service in this market. It is the easiest package to use and also very affordable by small businesses. They offer different packages suiting to your requirement and provide complete support for customizing the software according to your specific requirements.

Probably the third best CRM for small businesses is Sugar CRM. Over the last few years they came up with many different sophisticated add-ons to their package. The unique feature of this software is it is completely open source. That means if your programmers are well verse you can modify the complete packages according to your specifications.

Very few software dare to provide their complete package as open source. It reflects their confidence and ability. If you wish you can even hire their on-site engineer who would not only help you in customizing but they will also train your programmers about how they can go about to modifying the system as per the company specifications.

For some more excellent resources about on-demand CRM packages
please visit this website: http://www.smallbusiness-crmsoftware.net

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Michelle_Nisa”

CRM-Toolkit.com

CRM, Customer Service

Small Business CRM – Fueling Large Scale CRM Growth

Update on Current CRM Market

Top On-demand CRM Packages For Small Businesses

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